Dark Dragons (57 page)

“He’s right.  You’ve been pretty disrespectful to these
guys.  They’ve got balls, man.  A hard pair of rocks to be doing what
they’re doing.  They brought the best they had . . . fifty-cal and a
neutron bomb.  They more than likely knew they wouldn’t be coming
back.  One way trip, am I right?”

Carruthers didn’t respond at first.  Or couldn’t. 
His eyes suddenly went soft, distant.  Loved ones in mind perhaps. 
The other SAWDOG’s standing around held similar expressions.

“Something like that,” he said finally, so low Darren barely
heard him.

“That’s hard core, man,” Jorge continued.  “Fifty tough
bastards willing to lay it all out for everlasting martyrdom and seven billion
people.  They’re not ass hats or meat shields.  Could you write a
love letter to a relative before suiting up for a suicide mission, Darren?”

“Jesus, Jorge, you had me at ‘apologize,’” Darren said.

Fifty-one humans aboard an alien warship began to laugh
softly.  The anxiety boiling in everyone’s blood began to slake . . . some
smiles appeared.

Darren looked at the helmeted faces around him, his nut sack
just a little smaller than it was a minute ago.  “He’s right . . . I
apologize . . . to all of you guys.  I’m sorry.”  He looked to
Carruthers.  “When I get my wise ass mode in high gear, it’s sometimes
hard to let off the pedal. Sorry, dude.”  And he truly was.  All it
took was just one reasonable person to give you a hard slap across the face to
reconnect the faulty wires in your brain.  Darren looked around and
suddenly saw these guys for the first time.  “To hell with martyrdom. 
We’re all going to finish the mission and get the frick off this rock
together.  Random heroes.”

Carruthers face had softened.  “Thank you . . . and I
apologize, too, for not understanding your motive here . . . I get it now,
Darren.  When everything’s crumbling around you and everything’s FUBAR . .
. maybe that one person is all that matters . . . I get it.”

“Jesus, why don’t you guys just kiss and get it over with,”
Tony said, exasperated.

“If he puts some lipstick on, I might consider it,” Darren
answered.

A deep, barrel-chested laugh exploded from Carruthers’s gut,
and everyone standing within earshot responded with their own snorts.

“Jorge, put Brutus on a leash before he kills all of us.”

Brutus went into
STAND DOWN
,
and Darren heard his humming innards wind down.  The robot lowered his
disrupter cannons.

“Sorry about your weapon,” Darren said.

Carruthers shrugged.  “We have backups onboard. 
So, Jorge, you found a good spot for our nuke?”

“Yes, sir,” Jorge responded.

Darren noted Carruthers’s reaction to being called ‘sir.’ 
The CO let a small grin cross his face that did not look at all
supercilious. 
Nice one, Lopez.

“Brutus tagged another large chamber . . . this one above
that processing center . . . it’s about forty miles in diameter, the biggest chamber
aboard the moonship.”

Someone let out a slow whistle.

“It’s jammed with Vorvon bio’s . . . looks like a
city.  Brutus says over ninety-nine percent of all enemy signals are
located there.  So there’s your ground zero, sir.”

“So we’ll be all heading to the same place,” Carruthers
replied.  “Sounds like a plan is coming together.”

“I’ll have Brutus convert these files to binary language and
upload these schematics to you guys.  What’s your suit computers’
available flash memory?”

“Most of us have just over a single terabyte.”

“That’s plenty.  Here it comes.  You should see a
file icon show up on your operating screen.”

“Should we drop our firewalls?”

Jorge shook his head.  “No need.  Brutus can hack
through anything.”

“Wonderful.”

“There it is guys.  Click on that, and it will open up
several schematic maps of this sector of the moon all the way down to the core
ship and the surrounding structures.”

“Nice,” Carruthers said.  “Every damn corridor, air
duct, room and tri-rail tunnel route through Spookville.  Thank you, Mr.
Lopez, you just made our job easier.”

Darren looked and saw a green flashing icon of a circle on
his bottom info box.  He opened it, and a rotating pie wedge section of
the moonship appeared on his visor.  A red arrow marked their current
position just below the ship’s surface.  A long double-line snaked down
from the hangar to the core ship seven hundred miles below them——the tri-rail
tunnel.

“Looks like we can take this tunnel all the way to this
point here,” Jorge said.  He had everyone’s schematic operations locked
into his.  “We’ll have to demo charge into this air duct, here, just off
the platform station and walk the rest of the way to this chamber——wow, twenty
miles wide whatever it is——Brutus doesn’t have info.  There’s some kind of
lift tube that goes vertical from there up to that processing chamber.”

A man with a British accent asked, “Why are we taking air
ducts?”

Darren could see through the trooper’s helmet visor and saw
that he had a scruffy black beard and piercing blue eyes under equally shabby
brows.  He looked like a seventeenth-century pirate time-warped to the
present, a .50-caliber automatic rifle in place of a blunderbuss.  The
only thing that disagreed with the man’s tough-as-nails facade was his short stature,
about five and a half feet.  But Darren knew it was always the little guys
that never took shit from anyone foolish enough to bring their balls within
punching distance.

“Because the bad guys are using the corridors around that
station.  See all of those cylindrical objects?”  Jorge was referring
to the thirty or so ten-mile-long machines imbedded into the moon’s basaltic
mantel, all pointing toward the core ship.  “Those are mass focal
generators that are generating about point-eight gravity into the core ship . .
.  there’s one right next to that platform station, so you can bet those
corridors will be full of Vorvon workers.  We have no choice but to use
the air ducts.”

“Are they big enough for the Heavy Load Jack?” the Brit
asked.  “There’re no dimensions to these schematics.”

“Just over ten feet wide, according to Brutus,” Jorge
responded.

“That’s big enough,” Carruthers said.  The major then
stared at the deck for a few seconds, biting his bottom lip, apparently in deep
thought.  “Captain Middleton, I’m taking command of Vega Platoon.  I
didn’t come all the way to Spookville just so I could sit on my ass.”

“Yes, sir,” the Brit replied.

“Captain Parker, you’re to remain here with Vega Platoon and
keep our exit open.  Too many cooks will spoil the broth.”

Darren caught just the slightest look of ire cross Parker’s
face.

“Roger that,” Parker responded.

Jorge opened Brutus’s storage compartment and withdrew what
looked like gray hockey pucks.  He handed them to Darren, Tony and
Nate.  “Stash these invisi-mines in your bandoliers, and don’t let their
size fool you.  They have an ultrasonic re-phasic generator that uses
sound waves to shred the flesh of any organic body within a thirty-foot
lethality radius . . . think exploding jar of grape jelly . . . or . . . you
can just program them to explode, which will produce a thermobaric overpressure
of about three hundred psi and a fifty millisecond flash of around four
thousand degrees.  Depends on what kind of message you want to send.”

“Nice,” Darren said.

Jorge’s hands disappeared into Brutus’s innards and came
back with more Christmas goodies.  “These are seeker grenades.  They
fly just like our recon scouts, and when they explode, they can do one of two
things depending on pre-set programming . . . either produce a two thousand amp
field of electricity that’ll cook flesh and electronics within thirty feet . .
. or detonate self-replicating, nano-modulated acid that will fester on contact
to any surface and splatter the next bad guy, and the one next to him and so on. 
When it eats through personal armor and contacts flesh, it’ll liquify an entire
body in about ten seconds.  Nice little terror weapon.”

“Alright, Vega, let’s kick this off,” Carruthers said.

*

Towsley’s first reaction was not to order the Response Teams
back inside and rescue the kid, but to do it himself.  Without pause, he
turned away from Admiral Breuer and broke into a run back into the tunnel.
Several frantic voices called out to him, pleading for him to stop, but their
cries fell away as he put more and more distance from them.  He wasn’t
surprised at all when he managed a quick glance over his shoulder to see no one
had followed him.  They, too, had all carefully read the service manuals
concerning the ghastly effects of VT nerve gas.

When he reached the opposite end of the hangar, he stopped
and leaned up against the wall to catch his breath.  He had covered the
distance of almost four football fields.  Still, no one had appeared at
the tunnel to back him up.  Figures.

Straight ahead, among the ruins and lingering smoke of
Darren’s attack on the hangar sat Caliban’s gutted fighter.  Towsley
noticed the cockpit portal in the rear of the fuselage had been forced open.

He cocked a round into the Beretta and walked across the
wide expanse toward the alien vehicle.  Peering into the portal from about
thirty feet, his weapon up, he saw that the craft was unoccupied.  
Towsley could hear the capacitors that kick started the duel electrostatic wave
drives humming slightly which meant Caliban had tried to start them.  Most
of the primary switches and power couplings had been removed and dismantled for
analysis years ago.  This fighter wasn’t going anywhere.

Towsley guessed what Caliban’s reaction had been——he knew he
was now facing one pissed off extraterrestrial with a nothing to lose game
plan.

Towsley stepped into the main entrance, and for some stupid
reason he wanted to call out to Geils but checked himself. 
Get a grip,
old man.
  The Beretta shook in his sweaty hand.  He had no
saliva.  The stairwell was right in front of him.  Yet he could not
move.  The darkness beyond the window in the heavy steel door immobilized
him.

An angry alien.  Odorless nerve gas.  A helpless
kid.  All three waited for him on the other side of the stairwell door. 
The first bullet in his gun would either find Caliban’s heart, or if he
detected the first muscular twitch of VT nerve gas exposure, Towsley’s brain.

What about the kid?

Towsley tried to squeeze that ominous thought from his mind
and proceeded toward the stairwell door leading to Level One.  Did he have
the grace to put a bullet in the kid’s head as well, saving him from a slow,
excruciating death?  Would there be time to do them both before his
muscles seized?

The colonel stopped at the head of the stairwell and took a
long breath.  Slowly, with ears tuned, he descended the stairs.

After retrieving their camera scouts, Darren, Nate, and
Jorge stepped first through the circular portal onto the platform station,
weapons raised.  Several squid drones, quiet and motionless, were lined up
in orderly rows apparently waiting for their ride.  Beyond, they could see
a vertically curved wall, the outer circular surround of the horizontal
tunnel.  Judging by the angle of the curve, Darren guessed the mass
transit passageway leading down to the core ship had to be seventy or eighty
feet wide.

“What are these squidies doing?” Tony asked.  “Going
home after a long work day?”

“In a way, yes,” Jorge replied.  “There’s some kind of
recharging plant down in the core ship where they stay in storage.”

Darren smiled at his friend.  He was greatly
appreciating Jorge’s guidance, his bigger new role in their group.  Shy,
quiet Jorge Lopez . . . a half-American with a green card . . . living a life
of degrading poverty in rural Mexico just two years ago . . . speaking English
better than most ’Mer-icans . . . now directing the hell-bent charge into alien
territory to save mankind.  The guy with the killer robot had all of the
answers.

Looking around at his three friends, Darren suddenly felt
very afraid for them.

“Here comes our ride,” Jorge said.

“Check for enemy bio’s,” Darren said.

“None on board.”

A low rumble rose from behind the circular surround,
stopped, and the portal opened to reveal the machine inside.  The drone
creatures quickly filed in and disappeared into an alcove which led to a hidden
space under the floor.  Darren stepped inside first.  The tri-rail’s
interior was dimly lit and circular.  There were no chairs expect for
dozens of upright rectangular objects made of some kind of clear gelatin, all
arranged in rows perpendicular to the tri-rail’s length.  Each had a
pole-shaped machine inside the gelatin with wires and tubes snaking out. 
Darren poked a finger into one of them and discovered that it reacted to his
touch.

“Acceleration couches,” he said into his comm. 
“G-force absorbers.  Everybody take one and just lean back.”  Darren
faced the front of the vehicle and pushed himself backward.  The gelatin
inflated outward between his legs, arms and torso and around his helmet,
leaving the front of him exposed to air.  He was locked in but still had
some movement.

“Drive that HLJ to the back and right against the wall,
sergeant,” Carruthers ordered.

After everyone had secured themselves, a motion sensor
somewhere detected that all travelers were safely secure, and the tri-rail
began to stir.  Darren heard air outside the vehicle being sucked out of
the tunnel’s airlock.  After the chamber had been completely vacuumed, a
circular portal in front of the tri-rail opened to reveal the dark tunnel
leading down into the depths of the moonship.