Dark Dragons (58 page)

“Brutus says that we’ll be traveling up to a thousand miles
per hour.  It will take us about forty-five minutes to reach our destin-
aaaaaaaa.
. . !”

The massive vehicle vaulted forward without even a single,
courteous warning.  Darren felt himself pressed into the hard gel. 
The g-forces were excruciating, and he gritted his teeth.  Some of the
SAWDOG’s were whooping it up over the comm, apparently relishing the
sensations.  He was used to anti-g cockpit force fields negating this
shit.

“Six g’s!” Jorge shouted.

It went on for another ten seconds before the massive
acceleration unexpectedly stopped, and Darren popped out like a sponge.

“We’re at four hundred miles per hour,” Jorge said. 
“Hold on to your rocks because here comes another pulse!”

“What?” Darren shouted.

He felt himself mashed into the acceleration couch
again.  This time, it really hurt like hell.  He heard Jorge shout
something, probably trying to sound out the number of g’s, but couldn’t get his
mouth to work.  Not one cocky shout came from the bad-ass SAWDOG’s this
time.

Darren’s eyeballs felt like Jell-O, and his lungs had turned
to concrete.  Just when he believed he would actually start screaming, the
acceleration ceased.  The gel around him deflated, and Darren felt himself
pushed out of the acceleration couch.  Like him, everyone was trying to
maintain their balance and regain equilibrium.

“I like a good roller coaster, but holy cow. . . .”
Carruthers said, blinking his eyes rapidly.

“Where are we, Jorge?” Darren asked.

“Heading for the core,” he replied.  “One thousand
miles per hour there abouts.  We’ll be decelerating in about a half-hour.”

*

After another round of hard g’s during deceleration——this
time the gelatin couches rotated to face the rear of the tri-rail——Brutus used
his Omni-Interface Tool to gain access to the vehicle’s electronics systems
while the platform station’s air lock was pressurizing.  The robot planted
a bogus fire warning in the tri-rail’s electrostatic wave drive.  This
subterfuge prodded the Vorvons’ security VI’s to sound an evac on the platform
station, clearing out any Vorvons that might be waiting for a ride.  Still
mimicking the dead maintenance drone, Brutus signaled that the fire was being
attended to.

After the portal opened, a lone reconnaissance camera scout
from Darren’s helmet flittered out and checked the area.  Darren saw that
the Vorvons liked their lights turned down low.  The circular corridors
were dimly lit, but he knew that their large eyes didn’t require much light to
see.  The walls were oddly shaped with a creepy organic design——conduits
resembling veins, protrusions like polyps.  It gave the ominous impression
that they were inside a living creature.

Brutus’s trick looked like it worked.  The corridors
around the station platform were empty.  The fire alarm had a strange
bellow to it.  Like a lion grunting over and over.

Darren’s tiny recon scout spied an access which led to a
hidden alcove beneath the platform where they could secretly demo into the air
duct system and not reveal their intrusion.

“That’s where we go in,” Darren said.  “Jorge. 
You’re up.  Tony, Nate, you guys stay up here with your scouts and stand
guard.”

“Roger that,” Tony replied.

Jorge gathered some engineering gear from Brutus’s storage
compartment and quickly led everyone down into the alcove.  Time was a
factor.  Demolitions had to be completed promptly before the security VI’s
rescinded the fire alarm.

Jorge had a hand-held device that he swept across the
metallic wall in front of him in wide circular motions.  Something similar
to a stud finder.

“There’s two layers here,” Jorge said. “The first is just
over an inch thick.  The second is the air duct wall, about two inches.”

He revealed another contraption from his Swiss-army-knife
compartment of goodies which looked just like a caulk gun.  Jorge applied
a bead of clear gel starting from the floor, up the wall about seven feet high,
across to his right about five feet, down to the floor and back across. 
He then ejected a teeny gadget from a magazine clip in the gun’s handle and
embedded it into the gel.  A tiny light began to blink.

“Everyone might want to look away,” Jorge said.

A smokeless, arc welder-bright rectangle formed on the wall,
and Brutus moved forward to clamp the falling section between his arms, gently
lowering it to the floor.  Jorge applied a thicker bead of cutting gel to
the curved outside wall of the air duct, lit it up, and Brutus pushed the chunk
of metal into the duct with a thunderous clash.

The inside of the duct had a smooth, gun-metal gray
surface.  And dark at both ends.

Darren turned to Carruthers with a smile, “Into the rabbit
hole,” and went first.

*

Darren wanted to take point alone with Brutus, but Captain
Middleton requested that he and Vega Platoon’s second-in-command, Lieutenant
Webber, partake in the van formation too.  Soon, they were intel’ing one
another.  Middleton seemed cool and congenial, but Darren got the feeling
the Brit was just sizing them up, deciding if these eighteen-year old Yanks had
the guts, mental fortitude and honed skill of thirty year old special
operations troopers with a decade of stone hard training.  He asked a lot
of questions, most of which leaned toward room-to-room tactics and urbanized
combat.  That was okay, though, Darren thought.  He flat out said
Middleton could trust them when the shit-storm came.

“I guess you’re right,” Middleton finally said.  “I
watched that security tape from the Chinatown bank.  You lads took care of
those robbers well enough, and they were fucking ex-Delta, too.”

“Doom on them,” Darren said.

The sergeant snorted.  “Yeah . . . doom on them.”

Darren learned that Captain Trevor “Sock” Middleton’s first
baptism of fire took place in Sierra Leone in 2002 as a corporal in the British
Army’s 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment before joining the 22nd Special Air
Service in 2004 where he distinguished himself as one of that elite unit’s most
celebrated snipers.  His meteoric rise through the Queen’s special
operations forces then took him to Task Force 145, a joint American-British
“hunter-killer” unit which gathered intelligence on Iraqi suicide insurgents
and executed them with extreme prejudice when found.  TF 145 also served
as an open door for recruitment into SAWDOG which Middleton had been a member
of since 2007.

Majoring in astronautical engineering and space systems, he
received his bachelor’s at the University of Hertfordshire, now currently working
on his masters at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson
AFB, Ohio.  Middleton said his annual base pay would go from $80,000 to
$110,000 when he completed his masters.  Not a bad job being among the
highest paid soldiers in the militaries of Uncle Sam and Her Majesty.

“How come you guys don’t have laser rifles or gauss guns?”
Darren asked.  “They reverse engineered Vorvon magnetic field disrupters
and zero-point energy generators, so where’s the individual weaponry?”

“They’re working on it, mate,” Middleton replied. 
“Just waiting for the technology to shrink.  The smallest beamed energy
weapon the R&D boys have is some two hundred pound monstrosity that no
trooper in his right mind would lug around.”  Middleton hefted his
.50-caliber CAR15 with the M320 grenade launcher.  “Besides . . . Ol’
Patsy here works just fine in outer space.  There’s an electromagnetic
gyroscope gizmo in the butt stock that negates the recoil, so you don’t go
spinning off into space when you pull the trigger.  The SCAR-L’s that some
of the other boys are using have the same recoilless device.”

“Just out of curiosity, what kind of ammo are you guys
using?” Darren asked.

“As a matter of fact, the order to change ammo came down
from Carruthers pretty damn quick yesterday.  Now we’re using
seven-six-two Saboted Light Armor Penetrators for the SCAR-L’s and M110 sniper
rifles, and fifty-caliber High Explosive Incendiary-Armor Piercing rounds for
the carbines and Barretts.  Good thing too, because we received info from
some Marines who already tangled with the toads that both ammos just barely
pierce the aliens’ armor suits.”

“You’re lucky that order came down yesterday,” Darren said,
smiling from ear-to-ear.

“Yeah.  So tell me about
your
suits.  What
kind of alien-made nasties you got there?”

Darren gave him a quick rundown of his suit and weapon
specs.

Afterward, Middleton had a face that made him look like a
kid with a brand new Red Ryder BB gun who just found out his friend next door
received a brand new Remington .25-cal pellet rifle with a 12x50 RAD parallax
sight.  “Well, ah . . . our suits hopefully will hold their own.”

“With your SLAP and explosive ammo, they’ll be good enough
to fight the bad guys.”

“Not against their gautdamn laser guns.  Shit, we
didn’t know we were going to be fighting alien invaders until yesterday.”

“You’re kidding?  I thought the SAWDOG’s were created
years ago?”

“We were.  But every rank below O-4 wasn’t told squat
about E.T.  Hell, we all assumed we were primed for rapid deployment ops
against Iran or China or fucking Hezbollah.  Carruthers and the rest of
the chiefs disclosed ‘Actual Mission Directive One’ to us yesterday just after
this moon spaceship showed up in the sky.  Some heads up, huh?”

“There’ve been rumors in the brigade for years that we’d be
fighting aliens,” Lieutenant Webber said.  “Somebody told me that one guy
a couple years back got bodily removed out of his rack in the middle of the
night and never heard from again because he wouldn’t shut up about aliens.”

“I heard about that story, lieutenant, and it’s rubbish.”

“No it ain’t.  A guy in Capella Company told me he was
there when it happened.”

“Bullocks.”

“By the way, why is your call sign ‘Sock’?” Darren asked.

Webber let out a short gaggle.  “It’s not short for
‘soccer,’ that’s for sure.”

Middleton shrugged.  “Well . . . my old instructor at
Sennybridge kept giving me shit about my uniform being shoddy and all every
morning.  There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with my dress . . . that
bucktooth, ginger geezer just didn’t like me.  So . . . one day I came to
the morning queue with just a sock over my knob.  He didn’t like that . .
. spent a week in the brig for that stunt, fuck him.”

“I heard you SAS boys were real cheeky bastards to the
core,” Darren said.  “My kinda bunch.”

“‘Who Dares Wins,’ mate——SAS motto . . . so tell me your
story?  How did you lads get your fighters and those evil-looking suits?”

“An AI-piloted cargo ship from a civilization the bad guys
wiped out a long time ago crashed near my house and brainwashed the information
into us.”

Long pause.  “No shit.”

“Yeah.  ‘Random Heroes.’”

“Ain’t we all.”  Middleton threw a nod in Brutus’s
direction.  “I like your robot buddy here.  Everywhere I point my rifle,
I see a little hole in that force field follow my aim.”

“That’s his motion sensor.  He’s got other toys that
will impress you.”

“Does it blow shit up?”

Darren gave Middleton his best
Are you kidding?
-look. 
“That’s his specialty.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Hold up.”

Brutus just signaled in Xrel script
HALT FOR ANALYSIS
on Darren’s visor.  The battle drone had
several RCS scouts recon’ing the tunnel several hundred feet ahead of
them.  One of the flying cameras found a small vent shaft into what
appeared to be a tube of gray basaltic rock.  The schematic map indicated
the cave as one of several entrances into the twenty-mile wide chamber
underneath the processing area.

“Looks like we’re going spelunking.”

After gaining entrance with Jorge’s cut-welding gel, the men
discovered the cave turned out to be a dead end.  The map indicated that
it should have led directly to the mystery chamber below the processing
lab. 
What the hell?
  Twenty-eight humans stood around in a
dark cave wondering what to do next when Brutus discovered a button pad inside
the cap of a stalagmite.  Jorge pushed the button, and a wall of rock
suddenly pushed forward and up.

Sunlight.  Hot wind.  A smell of . . . coconut?

Darren walked up a short incline, pulse rifle to shoulder,
and stopped when he reached the cave’s wide entrance.  “Wow.”

“My god, we’re back in Iraq, boys,” Carruthers said.

A desert landscape under a bright blue sky and puffy clouds
stretched out before them.  Several miles to their left, a wide river
meandered through the scorching wilderness, bordered on both sides with lush
green marshlands, mangrove and date palms.  A “sun” low on the horizon to
their right cast long shadows from islands of palm forest scattered across the
desert ocean.  Was it early morning or late evening?  Darren could
even feel a breeze through his open visor.  In the distance, perhaps five
or six miles, stood the stone walls of an ancient city and a massive ziggurat
at its center.  Long neglected irrigation canals cut from the river bank
and sprawling plains of dead crop fields around the town may have been a clue
confirming the absence of human life.  The land, however dead, was
beautiful and mysterious, as if a chunk of Lower Mesopotamia had been literally
gouged from the earth four thousand years ago and carefully deposited inside
the moonship, making a perfect recreation of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin.

“Brutus says the sky is only four thousand feet high,” Jorge
said.  “Some kind of holographic projection screen.  But he can’t
identify the power source for that sun.”

Darren quickly connected the dots.  Scorch spoke
Akkadian, a dead language of Mesopotamia, and here was his place of birth, a
human prison built to look like home.