Dark Dragons (55 page)

Damage from the mysterious kinetic weapon which created the
impact scar was evident.  Several pad towers lay in twisted heaps at the
bottom of the hangar and only a smattering of lights here and there provide
some adequate lighting.  One of four gigantic mushroom-shaped structures
had partially separated from the wall, cracked in several pieces and tore a gash
in the hangar’s metallic shell, exposing the basaltic rock underneath.

Tony also saw that he wasn’t alone in the hangar.  In
fact there appeared to be some light reconstruction going on by hundreds of
five foot cybernetic organisms resembling squid walking on their
tentacles.  The half-robot, half-organic creatures were scurrying around
like worker ants, spot welding here and there, operating multi-arm hover mechs
and conducting small demolitions.

‘Fellas, I think I just got made.  There’s a swarm of robot
octopus thingies all over down here rebuilding the hangar.’

‘Brutus says to relax,’ Jorge replied.  ‘They’re
artificial non-sentient drones.  They’re no more aware of their presence
than they are of yours.  Just don’t kill any or interfere with them or
they just might sound an alarm.’

‘Brutus told me to relax, huh?’

‘I imagine if he was an AI and not a VI, that’s what he
would say.  Scope out a pad big enough for us all to set down next to one
another.’

*

“Colonel Towsley?”

“Yes?”

“Sir, this is Sergeant Collins down in the Containment
Area.  Caliban just used the request button on his chair.  Looks like
he wants something.”

“Ignore it, sergeant.  I’m busy.”

“I have, sir, but this is the fifth time he’s signaled.”

“All right, I’ll see what he wants.”  Towsley took off
his headset and stepped over to the COC’s closed-circuit security station, and
accessed the corner-camera in Caliban’s cell.

The alien stood in front of his recliner, shifting his gaze
between the camera in one corner of his cell and the TV monitor in the other,
waiting patiently for Towsley to appear.  The colonel switched on the tiny
camera mounted on the console in front of him and signaled,
What is it
Caliban?

Caliban request magazine to fight boredom.

You cannot read.

Caliban like pictures.  Request magazine.

What kind of magazine?
 
The colonel
noticed something odd about Caliban’s face.  He didn’t know what exactly
until he realized a moment later that the alien had somehow arranged what
little facial muscles he possessed to form a moderate attempt at human
expression.  Caliban was smiling at him.

Request
National Geographic, the alien replied. 
Enjoy pictures of volcanoes.

Finding himself quickly annoyed, Towsley shut the
console-camera off with a snap and returned to Taggart’s chair, placing the
headset back over his ears.  “Sergeant Collins?  Grab a
National
Geographic
magazine out of the head and put it in Caliban’s food
dispenser.”

“Sergeant Randel pinched all of the
National Geographic
’s
a week ago and stashed them in his quarters.”

“For crying out loud, just give him a
People
or
something.”

*

The human entered the observation room and gave Caliban a
look which the alien had learned over the long years of human interaction meant
suspicion.  He placed three magazines on the food dispenser tray and
closed the hatch.  The conveyor in the wall brought the magazines to his
cell, and Caliban quickly snatched them out of the cubical.  Two
Newsweek
’s
and a
National Geographic
.

Before the human left the observation room, he turned with a
smirk and fired an imaginary gun through the glass.  Caliban understood
the gesture and added another assignment to his growing list.

When the human finally sealed the door shut, the alien sat
down on the floor behind his recliner and carefully wedged the thick
National
Geographic
behind the chair’s electrical access panel.  He pulled the
magazine toward him, giving him enough space to slip his fingers in and bend
one corner of the panel down.  After doing the same with the bottom
corner, he used both hands to rend the panel door off, tearing the lock out in
the process.

When he recognized the recliner’s power supply box with the
lightning bolts, Caliban opened the
Newsweek
to the center page and
carefully picked at the top staple with his claws.  He pulled it out of
the magazine’s spine and clamped it between his teeth as he worked on the
second staple.  When he had both of them removed, he gingerly linked them
together into a frail, little chain about an inch and a half long.  He
began on the other
Newsweek
, and soon extended his chain to just over
four inches.

Caliban snapped the metal jacket off the power supply box
and examined the insides quickly.  After making some guesses, he tore a
tiny piece of paper from the magazine to hold the staple-chain and warily plugged
one end into an uncapped positive lead.  He inserted the metal fastener
into the negative socket and successfully produced a spark.

Caliban tore a page out of the magazine and held one corner
close to the contacts and touched the fastener once again.  It took about
ten strikes to finally ignite the paper.  Caliban aroused the flames with
slow puffs of air and stuffed the entire magazine into the panel.

Smoke triggered the detector, and water exploded from the
sprinklers.  A satisfying alarm tore through the base.

The soldiers would be coming soon.

*

“Fire in the Containment Area,” Forrester said, reading a
status box on a computer terminal.  “CU Three.”

The magazines.  “Caliban’s cell,” Towsley said. 
“That’s a deliberate fire, major.  Take two Response Team squads down
there and exterminate with extreme prejudice.”

“It’s about time, sir,” Forrester replied with revelry.

Towsley looked over at the far wall, ignorance working
overtime. 
Sure, Cal, what kind of magazine would you prefer?

*

Wearing CBRN suits, Forrester and five of his men rushed
into the circular corridor surrounding the containment units and clicked off
the safeties to their M4 carbines.

“Squad Eight is at the door,” Forrester said into his
mouthpiece.  “Squad Seven, stand by.”  Squad Seven stood guard back
in the laboratory, the only access into the individual containment units.

“Major Forrester?  This is Sergeant Collins in the
observation room.  The alien took out the lights in his cell, but I can
see him with my flashlight.  He’s squatting behind his chair.  He has
the VT canister in his left hand, but I can’t see his right.  Looks like
he’s waiting for you, sir.”

“We copy that, sergeant.  Keep your flashlight on
him.”  Forrester slid his access card into CU Three’s panel.  “Get
ready, gentlemen.  A steady burst in the chest, now.”  The major
typed his PI number.  The pneumatic seals decompressed, and the door slid
into its recess.

*

Forrester and his squad couldn’t see what was about to
happen.

Sergeant Collins suddenly did.  “No!”

*

With the VT canister in his jaws, Caliban leaped for the
security camera mount up in the corner just as he dropped the recliner’s
severed electric cable to the floor where the sprinklers had rained a half inch
of water.  Forrester and his men were safe in their polyurethane suits,
but electrocution had never been Caliban’s intention.  As soon as the door
whooshed open, the electrified water rolled into the corridor and delivered an
angry 220-volt surge into the stainless steel floor.  A cloud of sparks
exploded from Caliban’s recliner.  Breaker switches from somewhere inside
the base immediately cut the power in the Containment Area.

Caliban understood the dynamics of electrical conduction
well, and his hasty, long-shot planning had paid off.  He also knew humans
could not see in the dark unlike him.

The alien pushed off the wall and landed on his recliner
just as Forrester and his squad blindly fired into the cell.  He felt hot
bullets zip through his left arm and howled in agony.  Caliban leaped
again, this time for the door, and slammed one of the confused guards to the
floor in the process.  Snatching the M4 by the barrel, he jerked the
weapon out of the soldier’s hands before the man could fire and turned the
simplistic human toy on its owner with a short burst.  The alien spun on
his heels and cut down his remaining opponents groping and firing blindly in
the darkness.

*

“I can’t see!”

“Back out!  Back out!”

“Where’s the fucking lights!”

“Back out!”

“The fucking door won’t open!”

The voices of Squad Seven continued to scream over Sergeant
Collins’s head-set as he dashed out of the CU Three observation room with his
flashlight.   He tried to open the laboratory door with his access
card, but both squads inside were trapped——the electrical surge had juiced
every circuit.

A burst of M4 fire in his headset drowned out the panicked
voices of Squad Seven.  Collins backed away from the door, gripping his
9mm tighter.  The automatic fire fell silent as did the terrified cries in
his headset.

“Captain Grant?” Collins called out.  The leader of
Squad Seven did not reply.

“Sergeant Collins, this is Colonel Towsley.  Get your
ass out of there, now!”

“Major Forrester?”

A short rifle burst crackled, and he heard glass
shatter.  Collins froze, expecting more gunfire from the lab.  He
kept his eyes on the lab door in front of him, expecting the alien to smash it
down, but slowly realized that the rifle fire and breaking glass had come not
from the laboratory but from the CU Three observation room behind him. 
Stomach knotting, he turned and pointed both his flashlight and Beretta into
the darkness, but the yellow eyes were already on him.

*

So far so good.

Other than the weird cybernetic “zombie” squids diligently
repairing the Vorvons’ ruined hangar, the port was relatively quiet . . . no
blaring klaxons warning the inhabitants that humans had boarded their vessel or
Vorvon troops firing on the human invaders from the adjacent pad towers.

The SAWDOG’s wore what they called the Advanced Infantry
Ensemble Armor System, a bulky, boron-carbide ceramic plated suit that was
capable of zero-g ops in space and able to defeat high-ballistic tungsten
shot.  They had a simple HUD on the inner visor of their helmets and a
communications-network information system processor.  However, their
weapons were not exotic laser weapons cooked up in a DARPA lab somewhere but
simple 7.62mm SCAR-L assault rifles with FN40GL 40mm grenade launchers, and a
few monstrous CAR15 carbines that shot a .50-caliber, 400-grain soft-point
round that Darren was told had a devastating effect on body armor.  Some
also had heavy sniper rifle systems and a few anti-armor weapons.  All in
all, the SAWDOG’s looked like primitive versions of themselves, Darren mused.

The .09 gravity was a bit clumsy and laborious to get used
to at first, but the men of SAWDOG had several iridium weights secured to their
legs to simulate exactly 0.2 g of effective “fighting grav.”  Darren,
Tony, Nate and Jorge simply used the singularity-driven mass focal generators
in their boots to keep them weighted down to about 0.1 g.

The infiltration into the enemy’s moonship had been
thankfully uneventful.  The gathering at the bottom of the Andromeda’s
main gangway, however, threatened to become very eventful after a SAWDOG operative
rode an electric, six-wheel tractor down the ramp with what appeared to Darren
to be a bomb mounted on top.

“‘Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, U.S. Department of
Energy,’” Darren read from a small plate on the side of the weapon next to a radioactive
hazard trefoil symbol.  Someone with a clouded sense of humor had painted
a cowboy Yoda riding an atomic bomb like a bull rider and waving a light
saber.  The Jedi Master’s dialogue balloon said, “Make you glow I can . .
. luminous beings are we!”

“You brought a goddamn nuke?” Darren spat.

“I told you to forget about your girlfriend and scram the
hell out, didn’t I?” Carruthers shot back.  “Now you’re committed. 
Welcome to the show.”

“I don’t want to crash your party, major, but we’re going to
coordinate our plans, or I’ll have Brutus spay and neuter your firecracker with
one snap of my fingers.  Okay, tough guy?  I’m not going to let you
monkey wrench my ‘damsel in distress rescue mission.’”

“Brutus says you aren’t going to do much damage if you set
it off here,” Jorge said.

Darren turned to Jorge.  “What kind of bomb is it
anyway?”

“That’s classified,” Carruthers growled.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Chromium x-ray mirrors, nickel radiation shell,
thirty-grams of tritium in the core,” Jorge replied, reading Brutus’s data
stream.  “It’s a neutron bomb.  Explosive yield, only twenty
kilotons, but it has the radiological output of an 8 megaton thermonuke. 
Nice weapon of mass alien destruction, major, but if you want to fry every Vorvon
on this ship, you’re going to have to find another spot for it.  We can
help you with that.”

The concerned look on Carruthers’ face that his secret
weapon had just been thoroughly scanned and its software downloaded by a giant
alien robot pleased Darren very much.  But now was not the time to play
smart-aleck.

An unexpected voice broke the volatile tension.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Nate said.

“Please,” Darren said.

“I want very much for this bomb to go boom, too.  I
also want to help find Vanessa.  But both ops have no point of
destination, so let’s get Brutus to hack into the enemy’s computers and scan
the layout of this ship and go from there.  He can do that, can’t he
Mexico?”