Orion Colony Complete Series Boxed Set J.N. Chaney (books for new readers .txt) 📖

rotating barrels sat on each of the power armor’s shoulders as they cut through the infected at the door.

The infected didn’t have a chance. Rounds punctured them like a knife stabbing paper over and over again. The large infected, still carrying a hammer, took enough rounds to the face and chest to leave nothing of his upper body at all.

Just as suddenly as Dama and Sulk had opened fire, they stopped.

The infected on our side of the hangar doors were either dead or in the process of dying.

“Sulk, watch my back and make sure no more get through,” Dama ordered as they moved toward the door in the power armor suits, then disappeared through the opening.

On the top of each of their power armor’s vambraces, a thick square opening rested. At the same time they clenched their fists, sending a stream of fire through the entryway, cooking any infected that sought to gain entrance to the hangar.

“Maksim?” I said, shoving dead infected from the pile where I saw the assassin go down, fighting down my squeamishness at touching them. “Maksim, can you hear me?”

I still had no love for the man, but something was bonding us now. Fighting alongside another person had a way of doing that. I understood that he had sacrificed himself to buy us those few extra seconds to keep Legion at bay. If not for him, the power armor suit would not have been able to put a cork in the entryway so easily.

They might not have been able to stop them at all if Legion had gotten inside to the scores of power armor suits still empty. The thought of an infected in a power armor suit sent another round of chills down my spine.

“Maksim?” Stacy called out as she and John helped me sift through the bodies. “Maksim, can you hear me?”

“Here,” John called out, rolling over a dead infected from the center of the pile. “He’s here.”

“Oh no,” I said, going over to where Maksim lay.

I was no doctor, but I knew a serious injury when I saw one. His leg was bent at an odd angle behind him, and his throat was slashed and oozing blood. A dozen other cuts lay over his face and torso.

“Brother,” Maksim wheezed as he lay on the ground, staring up to the ceiling, although I doubted he could actually see anything.

“Hold on. Let me get something to stop the bleeding,” Stacy said, looking around frantically.

“My time is done here,” Maksim managed to say weakly just above a whisper. “I need to speak…to my brother.”

I pulled off my helmet, making my way through the piles of bodies, and knelt next to Maksim. A war raged inside of me as to what I felt for the man. Half of me could never forget what he had done to destroy so many lives on the Orion and the dreams of others. The other half saw the more recent image of him jumping to defend the doors and sacrificing his life in the process.

Maksim reached for my hand and gripped it tighter than I thought he’d be able to in his weakened state.

“It’s on you to kill him now.” Maksim moved his eyes from the ceiling to look me full in the face. “Swear to me you will not let him leave this planet.”

“I swear,” I told him, swallowing hard. “He’s not going anywhere.”

“In another life, you would see that we were in fact brothers, cut from the same cloth,” Maksim said, turning his blank-again gaze back to the ceiling. “Kill Legion, brother. Kill him.”

Maksim let out a long, shuddering exhale of breath and lay still.

There on my knees over his dead body with the sounds of the flamethrowers going off behind me, I was left at a loss as to what to feel.

I wasn’t sure how long I knelt there. Seconds, minutes maybe. The sound of steel snapping eventually broke me from my trance-like state.

I looked over to see Sulk tear a piece of steel from between the two hangar bay doors. The doors worked once more and closed a moment later.

Stacy was with Tong as he woke from his unconscious state. I figured he had a nice splitting headache at this point, but at least he was alive. I couldn’t take any more of my friends dying at this point.

John had found his way to the control panel, trying to figure out how to turn on the lights in the hangar bay room.

“I’m not going to even pretend to know what I’m doing here,” John said, looking at the control panel in exasperation. “Why does this section of the bunker have these blue lights and everything else was dark? There has to be power here, but why can’t we turn on all the lights?”

Now that the hangar bay doors were closed, Dama piloted her mechanical armor over to where John stood over the controls. She pressed a button that opened a section of the giant armor’s center chest plate with a hiss.

She jumped down the remaining feet to the ground below and sidled up next to John, pressing keys on the control panel.

“The hangar for the power armor is on a different system than the rest of the bunker. It does, in fact, still have power, but it transferred to conservation mode when the hangar was locked down. I’m resetting the power now,” Dama said, working over the controls.

A second later, brilliant white light lit up the hangar bay. I winced, shielding my eyes as we went from dull blue lights along the floor and ceiling to what seemed brighter than day inside the hangar.

What I saw took my breath away.

The hangar was a giant room deeper than it was wide. Along the far wall stood an army of power armor suits. They were shoulder to shoulder, with their impressive black and grey forms gleaming in the brilliant light. I got my first good look at them. They ranged from eight to ten feet tall, covered in robust