“Mik’t, when is the next guard rotation?” Jean asked, trying to plan the best time for the attack.
They’d learned some troubling information after convincing the Scaladorian to join their cause. The plan they’d developed would work, but the timing would not. According to Mik’t, the Scaladorian government was struggling with resources. Because of that, rotations were now three times longer than before and spirits were low across the guard population.
“Unless new orders come down, we have another twenty solars before a new rotation drops.” His modulator translated. “Will that be enough time to draw an army?”
“It should. The four of us plan on spending the next several days looking for potential fighters in the mines.” Monique said, running a cloth along the stinger-like blade across her lap.
“Let me know which quadrant you’re working in. I will try to ensure the patrols do not find you. If I cannot, I will give you as much warning as possible.” Mik’t said, pulling several radios from his armor. “I programmed these with a very specific frequency. They will only speak to their brothers, so you do not need to worry about being caught.”
“Not to chance the subject from something we’ve talked about time and time again, but I need to understand the use of this blade.” Monique shifted the conversation away from plans and to something more likely to keep her alive in the coming days.
“It is standard among my people. The spiral is reminiscent of the stingers we are born with, but instead of being short like mine,” he explained, raising his second set of arms to show spiraling stingers at the tips of two fingers, “we use the blade for more deadly combat.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“I need to treat it as a piercing weapon?”
“Masters have been known to slash with their stinger, but you are right. The most effective way to fight my kind is to drive the tip of your stinger through the carapace and allow the tone produced in the hilt to disorient them.”
Jean took a radio, clipped it on his belt, and slipped his hand inside an armored gauntlet. Despite Monique’s nonchalance, they needed to recruit as many prisoners as possible to the cause. He didn’t have time to sit here in the quiet depths of an unknown world, making plans that would probably result in their deaths. And he certainly didn’t have time to listen to another demonstration of the alien weapons they’d stolen.
It was time to act.
The bald man swung his pick over his shoulder and walked up the tunnel toward the secret entrance. While he walked, he studied the stone carvings along his path. The people depicted here were brave for their efforts to destroy the mining effort, but it wasn’t enough. Most of the stories were short, their people dying off much too quickly to establish a firm foothold of defiance. Some were long, depicting a painful, drawn-out death that ended in sorrow for so many.
He did not intend to be a repeat of either story. Instead of telling the tale of humanity by carving it into these walls, he’d done something a little different. With nothing but a hammer and chisel, he scratched two things into their place on the wall.
The first was a saying that would have no impact on future races that could neither read the words nor understand their origin. But simply recording the phrase ‘Here, there be monsters’ was enough to bolster the spirit of any human that saw this carving.
The second was a symbol that struck fear into the hearts of men for generations on end. One used against tyrants to spell coming doom and by sailors as an expression of freedom from that same tyranny.
Jean had no place to fly a jolly roger, yet. Instead, it would wait here, carved on the walls of a long-forgotten tunnel until the day he, and all the inhabitants of this manufactured hell, were free.
