Dark Dragons (63 page)

“I see that!” Carruthers shouted over the comm.

The surviving SAWDOG’s began to converge on Darren, Tony and
Nate’s location into a circled wagon formation.  Darren took a blind shot
at the last two hover knights who were darting in like fish, picking off the
humans not concealed behind cover.

Darren ordered his bros to take point outside the ring of
human defenders.  Darren and Nate took left while Tony took right. 
Dashing behind a stasis cell, he spotted the first squad of bad guys less than
thirty feet away, four humans and two Vorvons hunkered together in a tight
formation.  He would make them pay for the group huddle.  He aimed
his pulse rifle, sent the fire solution to the first grenade in the EPG
launcher—
—I’ll name you Cherylyn
——and pumped her down range.  The
armor-piercing little girl zipped in between two baddies, found the space in
the center of their mistake and detonated, sending pieces of armor and flesh
outward in a bright flash.

*

“Achilles One, this is Able Dog!” Sergeant Taylor shouted in
Carruthers’s headset.

Carruthers jerked a .50-cal round into the air, clipping the
left leg off a hover knight as the monkey flew by.  “Go ahead Able Dog!”

“Sir, we are under attack by multiple alphas! 
Situation critical!”

“Join the club Able Dog!”

“Sir, I’m no longer reading telemetry from our nuke!”

Carruthers turned away from the battle and stared at the
steel floor.  “Come again your last!”  Even though his chief engineer
was thousands of feet below him trapped in a stone temple, he had heard the man
just fine.

“Our bomb has been compromised!  Some kind of focused
EMP burst!  I can’t prime the trigger and there’s——” The sound of an
un
human
scream cut Taylor off, then silence.

Carruthers looked up at the hover knights flitting about,
blazing away with their weapons.  “Shit!”  He slammed the butt of his
carbine down on the deck. 
“Shit!”

*

Jorge rolled out from cover and fired on the shocktroopers
concealed behind a thrumming machine at the far end of the room.  This
allowed two SAWDOG’s to jump from cover and retreat to the stairwell leading
back to the stasis cell chamber.  They were in a power support room under
the chamber.  Jorge’s suit sensors had picked up movement there, so he led
two of the men into the room to block the enemy’s advance.  But there were
more Vorvon and Akkadian shocktroopers pouring in from somewhere, and he knew
he had to move.

Jorge burped a grenade from his EPG, and the weapon found
three baddies behind a corner to his left.  No longer pinned down, he
stood and retreated backwards.  He primed an invisi-mine for thermobaric
detonation, slid it underhand hard across the floor before it stopped thirty
feet away, and hauled ass back to the stasis cell chamber.  Brutus was
there at the top of the stairwell, concealed behind a huge pipe elbow rising
from the floor and curving away to feed one of the large life support
machines.  Jorge pitched one more invisi-mine at the bottom of the
stairwell, this one set for ultrasonic tissue burst.  He ran hard out of the
mine’s blast radius and joined six SAWDOG’s and Captain Middleton behind cover.

A deep explosion and sharp smack in the air nearly blew
everyone’s eyeballs out.  Jorge gritted his teeth, and dust blew off every
surface in the stasis cell chamber, filling the warm air with an amber haze.

“Count eight less bad guys!” Jorge shouted with gusto. 
“Thermobaric death god!”

Middleton contorted his jaws.  “Try not to plant those
so gautdamn close next time!”

“Sorry, sir!”

Seconds later, a high-pitched, wavering shrill erupted from
the bottom of the stairwell followed by the sickening sound of multiple
splatters.

“Peanut butter and jelly!” Jorge said, leveling his pulse
rifle toward the entrance.  “Here they come!”

Brutus hovered into position and fired down into the support
room.  Immediately, his force field came under enormous strain from the
shocktroopers’ return fire which caused the robot’s generator to divert power
from his weapons system to maintain the shield’s integrity.  This limited
Brutus’s weapon selection to just one 50-kilowatt laser pulse gun, but the
battle drone was using that one weapon with commanding skill.  Jorge
counted at least five enemy dead with a quick peek at the robot’s forward
point-of-view screen on his visor.

Brutus backed off his position at the top of the stairwell
behind cover to let his power level out and primed his disrupter cannons for
maximum discharge.

“Mess ’em up, boy!” Jorge cried.

Brutus returned to his cover spot and spat red lightning
into the support room with earsplitting destruction.  Every machine,
computer console and power conduit burst into molten shrapnel and fire as he
swept his arms in wide arcs, armor and flesh vaporizing under the ultra-heated
energy.  Those Vorvons and Akkadians not cooked in the beams instead were
thoroughly ventilated and cauterized by the supersonic shrapnel.  The
robot’s disrupter capacitors finally drained, and Brutus hovered back behind
cover to let them recharge.

“Wow,” Middleton gawked.  “Sure knows how to clear out
a room!”

*

This is Sandra . . . she’ll keep you warm at night . . .
and this is Jackie who likes piña coladas and gettin’ caught in the rain.
  Darren
spat his third grenade, taking out three Vorvons at his eleven o’clock.  A
laser strike grazed his helmet, and he ducked down, scanned his battle map
screen and spotted a single shocktrooper sneaking up the adjacent aisle toward
him.  Darren steered his rifle slaved to the suit’s Firing Angle Locator
and pulled the trigger when the little light on his visor turned red.  A
pair of blasts cut through a life tube and blew the hidden creature backward,
dead.

Nate struck a Vorvon’s anti-gravity pack on its hip, and the
alien flew out of control over the field of stasis and rammed head first into
one of the big life support machines, killing it instantly.

Ears suddenly ringing, Darren sensed an enemy presence above
him and jumped back just before the son-of-a-bitch fired a shot into the
deck.  Darren swung his rifle up, but the shocktrooper——a human——kicked it
sideways out of his grasp.  The Akkadian landed in front of him war
screaming, his eyes wild under the faceplate.  Darren’s right hand found
his vibro-knife’s handle in the scabbard slot under his left arm.  Before
the human could rebound upright and fire its stubby assault weapon, Darren
turned ninety-degrees to the left and returned with the humming 8-inch blade
through the air, slashing though the man’s armor and into the body with barely
a pause.  The Akkadian screamed, bent over, and Darren came back with the
knife underhand this time and sunk his weapon into the helmet, pulling the
blade toward him and nearly slicing the head in two.

Immediately to his right, a huge shadow reared over a
humming machine.  He spun quickly to the left and came out of his
270-degree turn with the needle pistol in his left hand.  Darren pulled
the trigger from the hip and blew the Vorvon back against the machine just when
another bad guy appeared in front of him.  He turned and fired point-blank
into the alien’s face.

“Darren!” Nate screamed.

He spun around in time to catch the last hover knight blown
sideways by Nate’s EPG grenade.  The alien had been right behind him and
about to fire point-blank into Darren’s head.  He did not notice the
creepy giant sneak up on him.

Darren holstered his weapons and seized his pulse rifle from
the floor.  The wild belligerence cascading around him drugged him into
more violence.  His moves were fluid, precise like an insect’s, as he
picked up where he left off and swept his rifle to and fro, anesthetized from
the adrenaline, emotions and fears suppressed.

His suit computer counted four aliens remaining, but the
shocktroopers were retreating, firing sporadic blind shots to cover their
escape.  Brutus, of course, had racked up most of the kills.

“Jesus, Darren . . .”  Nate was eyeballing him up and
down.  “I watched you die, yo.”

“What are you talking about?”

Nate took a sip of water from his dispenser.  “The
Vorvon that came up behind you . . . I watched it . . . shoot your damn head
off . . . and then, like, I got all tunnel vision and fuzzy . . . and there you
were again still alive and standing, and I see the same Vorvon coming out from
behind that stasis cell, and that’s when I shouted at you . . . damn, that shit
was weird.”

“You had a precognition event, or whatever that military
doctor called it,” Darren said.  “Remember he thought we might have the
power of future sight?  You just had one.  You saved my ass . . .
right here, bro.”  Darren offered his hand for a high-five and Nate
obliged.  “I hope that comes in handy for me sometime.”

“There’s a chance the enemy will be back with
reinforcements,” Carruthers said scanning the air above them.  “Fish . . .
Rizzo . . . Whiplash . . . holster your carbines and use those dead toads’
laser weapons.  Everyone else, collect dog tags.”

The hidden Guardian screamed again, a beast in wrath
promising violence.  An icy hiss like a low murmur arose from the
thing——some kind of voice, a deadly warning in its own tongue.

“Darren, I think I see Vanessa,” Tony said.

Darren turned to him to acquire his line of sight. 
“Where?”

“I have an RCS lock two hundred feet, ten o’clock.”

Darren ran through the fields of empty stasis cells,
ignoring the warnings from the men behind him to slow down and not get
separated.  He finally inhaled air when he reached a clutch of glass
cylinders surrounding a large machine where Vanessa hovered unconscious in the
only occupied cell.  Fleshy lace growing from a repulsive mass of organic
growth at the bottom of the cell covered her nude body.

Darren took a moment to study the machine at the base of
Vanessa’s glass prison, but he did not know what button to push.  He
wanted to get her out quickly and shield her modesty from the others
approaching but was powerless as to how.  Finally, Darren fired into the
base of the tube, and deep cracks spider-webbed upward.  The butt of his
pulse rifle finished the stasis cell’s integrity, and the invisible force
levitating her body shut down.  Darren quickly pulled her limp form out,
tearing the slimy organic tendrils from her body.

“Vanessa, can you hear me?”  Darren checked her over
quickly to see if she was indeed all right and not growing anything abnormal,
but Vanessa appeared to be fine.  In fact, color began to return to her
pale skin.

“Vanessa wake up,” he said inches from her face.

A SAWDOG medic knelt down next to her and placed his
backpack on the floor.  “Let me look at her.”  The moment he flashed
a pen light in her eyes, Vanessa suddenly lashed out screaming, striking Darren
across the helmet and shoulders, her eyes bugged out.

“Vanessa, you’re okay!”  Darren shouted, dying inside.

Her body went rigid as steel, and her eyes rolled back into
their sockets.  She was fainting.

“No, it’s all right!”

Vanessa stopped thrashing long enough to look him in the
face——and slipped back into unconsciousness in his arms. 
How fucking
humiliating.  I’m not that ugly!
 He knew this wasn’t the time or
place to sulk that the girl of his dreams had fainted away at the sight of him,
but Darren’s face glowed hot with embarrassment anyway. 
I came all the
way here for this?

From his bag, the medic unfolded an aluminized thermal
blanket and wrapped it around her body.  “She’s going into shock,” he
said.  He pulled a small oxygen bottle with a breather mask from his medic
bag and placed it on her face.

“Are you sure that’s all, buddy?  How do you know?”

The medic withdrew another device from his bag, something
that looked like an industrial-sized smart phone connected to a pen with a long
red wire.  He touched the pen to the inside of Vanessa’s elbow, and the
gadget beeped.  The guy repeated the process to her left wrist.  “I
just did a CMP and ABG blood test.  The analyzer will give us a reading in
a minute or so.  Then we’ll know for sure if she’s . . . okay inside.”

Another scream from the Guardian turned everyone’s heads in
the direction from which it came.

“We might not have a minute,” Darren said.  He
holstered his pulse rifle and slipped both arms under Vanessa’s limp
form.  “We gotta move.”

“My RCS found a lift platform at the other end of this
chamber,” Tony said.  “Eight hundred feet in that direction.  Don’t
know where it goes, but it has to be better than here.”

Vanessa had not gone into shock after all, looking from side
to side, gathering her bearings.  Her roving eyes stopped at his face.

“Please don’t scream at me again,” Darren said.  “We’re
here to get you out of here.”

“I won’t,” she muffled through the oxygen mask.

“Are you okay?”

Vanessa took a moment to ponder that, then, “I think so.”

“The blood analyzer says she’s alright,” the medic
said.  “A little dehydrated, but no foreign particulates present.”

She continued to stare at him with blank eyes.  Almost
like a newborn baby fascinated with its mother’s face.

Recognition? 
I doubt it
, he thought. 
Probably
disappointed that Dorkboy has come to her rescue and not Todd the Romance Novel
Coverboy.

“Darren Seymour?”

He smiled.  “I promise I will explain everything in
full detail after we get out of here and save the day.”

“Okay . . . but . . . is there something I can wear . . .
other than this?”  She tugged at the thermal blanket.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”  Darren looked over at
Carruthers’s tired face.  “Sir, permission for Vanessa to wear one of your
men’s suits?”