Copyright J.B. Norman
Peering around one of the ice pillars, Amarantha and Dunstella squint through their snow goggles, attempting to discern what exactly is happening through Amarantha’s sorcerous snowstorm.
“I think that one’s Kathryn,” Dunstella notes, pointing to the tall shape moving through the snow.
The tall shape pounces on a second smaller shape and does something that might be a punch or kick or some other way of inflicting grievous bodily harm on somebody.
Dunstella points to the second shape, now sprawled out and groaning.
“My leg! She kicked my leg out of my leg!”
“And that’s one of the bad guys.”
“Where is she?” another one of the shapes calls.
“I can’t see her!”
Through the blowing snow, Amarantha and Dunstella watch as Kathryn’s shape looms up over the two mercenaries, grabs them, and smashes their heads together.
“The joke’s on you!” the last of the mercenaries calls, wheeling around towards Kat and levelling his stun rifle at her. “I can see exactly where you are! I’ve got my visor set to—Ack!”
A snowball sails through the air from Dunstella’s hand, right into the side of the mercenary’s face, allowing Kathryn to throw her full weight at him, knock him to the ground, wrestle his rifle away from him and subdue him.
With the last of the Kraken Special Squad fireteam dealt with, Amarantha stops channelling her sorcery and the blowing snow inside the chamber of the Crystal Labyrinth falls still. The silence that falls over the chamber is broken only by the moaning and groaning of the vanquished mercenaries.
Kathryn stoops over the fireteam’s leader and snatches his communicator from off his armour.
“Uh,” she says into the communicator, realising she’s not sure what she actually wants to say, before clearing her throat and trying again. “We, uh, we have a visual on the princess and her friends. They’re doubling back towards the entrance, so the other fireteams should definitely all go that and cut them off.”
The other fireteams answer in the affirmative.
“And, uh,” Kathryn continues. “We’re fine. We’re all fine. Here. Now. Thank you. How are you?”
“I slipped on the ice and my back really hurts,” one of the other fireteam leaders answers.
“It, uh, it was a rhetorical question,” Kathryn mutters. “Over.”
“Captain,” Amaranatha hisses as the comm falls silent. “You told them all to head back to the entrance!”
“Yeah, so they’ll all go that way while we go another way,” Kathryn explains.
“There’s only one entrance! How are we supposed to get out if they’re all at the entrance now?”
Kathryn’s eyes go wide as she realises her blunder.
“Frang it,” she mutters.
The stolen comm crackles back to life, and a woman’s voice comes through with a Syntaxian accent.
“Who is this?” she asks. “I don’t recognise your voice. What’s your callsign?”
“Um,” Kathryn mutters, wincing. “… Cally McSignGuy?”
“It’s them!” the Syntaxian woman’s voice says on the other side of the comm. “Track their location!”
“Frang it,” Kathryn mutters.
She throws the comm to the ground and stomps on it desperately, grinding it into the ice with her heel until it’s nothing more than a pile of shattered electronics.
“Go!” she calls to Amarantha and Dunstella.
So, basically:
It’s pretty much impossible to write a SciFi story after 1977 without including Star Wars references… But, also, the “We’re fine. We’re all fine.” scene is one of the my favourite in the entire franchise.
Though, that being said, I am trying to avoid making too many Star Wars references.
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
