Another blast, and that one nearly scorched away Wemble’s shoulder. He was trying his damndest to keep out of sight, tucked behind an old medipak crate. Battle had been going on for almost a year now and they were close to extinction. The enemy might have outnumbered them, but the worst of the rebels’ problems were those damn anti-ray shields.
“Fuck! Selba! Do you have any of those electromagnetic displacers?” Wemble ducked his head down just before another blast sizzled against the wall next to him.
The girl yelled out from behind a large pile-up of crates across the warehouse, “All out! Better hope their batteries die soon!”
“Great,” Chief Wemble muttered to himself as he looked at his belt of flame-ray ammunition and thought it to be akin to attempting to destroy a planet by flicking peanuts at it. The guards were no doubt closing in by now; each had a scanner locking in on their location.
Peeking up over the cover, he fired a few rays at the one in the lead and watched the bolts of red dissipate around an invisible shield wall a few feet from his body.
“He’s over there!” he heard one shout, but Wemble wasn’t about to wait around. He heard the lasers and ray guns going off behind him, pounding into every object he passed as he bolted for the large pile of crates. Sweat rolled down his face as he dove behind a them, narrowly missing a shower of lasers and heated ions. The three soldiers following him were getting closer…he could hear them chattering about possible locations.
Wemble’s eyes skimmed the floor around him, looking for something, anything that could afford protection. Scrap metal, fragments of shattered Chinese vases, bits of painting fluttering away from him.
It was then that the last Chief of the Moon Rebels found Eureka.
A soldier turned the corner just as Wemble knew he would and raised his weapon as if preparing to put down a wounded animal. One grunt and a gurgle later, he was dead on the floor and a crazed Chief of the Moon Rebels flung himself out from the shadows, “For the Moon!” Like a possessed warrior, he swung the artifact of power over his head and downed the remaining patrols in a matter of seconds.
When Selba finally arose from her hiding place she found Wemble covered in blood, clutching the thing of great destruction and power in his left hand. “What… the hell is that thing? And what the fuck did you just do?”
With a grin, the Chief looked to his bewildered tech officer and hefted the metallic thing up onto his shoulder, “This is a 21st Century artifact called a sword,” he said. “And I just found the key to winning this fucking battle.”
Selba blinked wildly and the Chief walked around the room, examining the remnants of battle. “Hm…let’s start with stripping the metal off the walls.”