Dark Dragons (68 page)

*

Vanessa pierced the shocktrooper’s thin armor with a single
shot to the chest.  Four of them had rushed the control room from the
short corridor, but Jorge brought down three while Vanessa leaned out from
cover and clipped the forth.  Her first kill.  She glanced at Jorge,
and he saw a turbulent look of both revulsion and delight on her face.

“That’s the way you do it!” Jorge said. “Put ’em down fast
before they put you down!”

 The alien’s laser rifle had landed five feet in front
of her, and she went for it.

“Whoa, hold up!” Jorge shouted, following her into the
corridor to provide cover.  He fired a grenade into the machine room to
clear out any shocktroops that might be around the corner.

Vanessa picked the alien weapon up and retreated back into
the control room, shoving Darren’s needle pistol into the suit’s nylon side
holster.  She pulled the trigger to test the rifle and smiled when a
bright green burst of energy fired.  “Human-friendly!” she shouted at
Jorge.

An explosion flashed back in the machine room, and he heard
several Vorvons screech in agony.  The familiar sound of laser pulse guns
echoed off the walls, and Jorge’s eyes lit up.

“No, it can be. . . !”

He peered around the corner in time to see a shocktrooper’s
ragged body spinning through the air.  A huge black shadow appeared . . .
and Brutus’s mangled form hovered into the corridor.  The battle drone’s
head drooped to one side, and he had only one disrupter cannon working. 
His upright body looked cracked, but his force field was working just fine.

It wasn’t until Brutus moved under a ceiling light that
Jorge noticed Nate lying on the robot’s back, one arm wrapped tightly around
Brutus’s neck, the other hand holding his needle pistol.

“Nate!” Jorge screamed. “You’re alive!”

“My comm is damaged,” Nate said through his external
speaker.  His wheezing voice cracked.  He sounded weak.  “I
thought I wasn’t going to . . . see you guys again.”

Jorge was not receiving any of the robot’s data feeds nor
could he communicate mentally with him.  “Brutus is messed up, too, so I
couldn’t see you guys coming.  How
messed up
are you?”

“Would you believe my sub-suit . . . is still intact . . .
but I got broken bones everywhere . . . and I’m coughing blood . . . but I’m
purple haze, baby . . . purple haze.”

Nate was absolutely back stroking in a pool of pain
narcotics.  Jorge smiled at his friend and thanked Jesus for answering his
prayers.  “Stay right there on Brutus’s back, okay?  Don’t go heroic
and try jumping off.”

Nate nodded his head with a dreamy look.  “I can’t walk
anyway, man.”

*

Darren flicked his left wrist and fingers and quickly
discovered up, down, forward, reverse, clockwise, counterclockwise and
stop.  Unbelievably simple.  The hover pack barely hummed under his
weight.  He lowered himself to the deck behind the cylinder machine and
checked his RCS screen.  The saturating magnetic field slightly disrupted
the signal feed from his scout, but through the static Darren saw seven hover
knights remaining.  They had sought cover behind a tall spherical object
on the floor of the tunnel two hundred feet away.  The shadow spawn had
yet to climb the broken crossway and overrun him.  Perhaps they were still
suspicious of another invisi-mine.

Stalemate, Darren guessed.  Or the Vorvons were waiting
for fresh troops to arrive before the final push.  Everyone had to bust
through the hull and soon.  00:15:48.

Darren looked up at the great river of superheated plasma
racing through the coils and wondered if it was possible to redirect the
magnetic field into the side of the tunnel and burn their way out.  He
still didn’t know exactly what this thing was.  Perhaps the plasma tunnel
could be a fusion reactor or a component of one, and that the reason for its
construction near the hull was so that excess heat could be shed into
space.  Which would mean that some kind of venting system existed
somewhere.  Darren saw a structure on the schematic map that could be
something of that nature, but it lay over two miles down the tunnel.  In
between them and the structure were seven hover knights, hundreds of shadow
spawn . . . and hover tanks?

“Oh shit!”  Where did they come from?  “We got
incoming armor, people!  A whole damn column!”  He counted eight
metal turtle shells slowly levitating toward them in single file, their main
guns locked upward like angry fingers.  It was time for him to move.

Darren flicked his wrist and leapt off the deck, racing
through the air toward his friends on the other side.  A couple of hover
knights took shots at him, but his evasive zig-zagging put them off. 
Darren landed on the deck, nearly tripping over a dead squidie.

“Look at you, Seymour,” Tony said.  “A flying monkey.”

“Nate!” Darren shouted.

“Whuddup, ma’fucka?” Nate moaned with a grin.

Darren raced over to his friend nearly passed out on
Brutus’s back.  “Oh my God, we thought you were dead.”

“That ugly brute couldn’t kill me, bro.  I’m a mushroom
cloud layin’, superfreak piece of dolo-mite . . . could you do the dishes for
me?  I gotta finish my homework.”

“Huh?”

“He’s doped out, man,” Jorge said.  “Catching flies on
the ceiling, and he ain’t coming down for a while.”

“How much juice has Brutus got left?” Darren asked. 
“Can his disrupter cannons punch through the hull?”

“I don’t know,” Jorge replied.  “He’s only got one
left, and his data comm is damaged.  I can send him messages, but he can’t
transmit anything back to me.  He’s mute.”

“Is everyone zero-g ready?”

Everyone corroborated.

Middleton reached down and intertwined his arm around the arm
of an injured SAWDOG, pulling him to his feet.  “We’ll have to secure
ourselves when the tunnel depressurizes or we’ll get sucked out and go spinning
off into space.”

“Isn’t that what we want?” Tony asked.

“No, laddie.  We use the SPIE rig I have in my pack and
secure it to something solid.  When the atmosphere is cleared out, we’ll
untether and kick off.  Darren, your hover rocket there is most
convenient——you’ll take lead.  Tony, in order to get to your fighter,
you’ll have to cut loose after we exfil——so you’re the last fish on the
line.  Let’s do this.”

Middleton removed the Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction
rig from his pack and unspooled it on the deck.  The cable had several
O-rings inserted into the twine every four feet.  It looked like it had
enough slots for twelve people.  The captain fed the first O-ring through
the closed clamp of Darren’s rifle holster and secured him to the second O-ring
with a loose carabiner, leaving the first ring open.  Another trooper
hooked Middleton to the third O-ring through a permanent carabiner on his
suit’s back, and the process was repeated until all nine people were strung out
like minnows on a line.  Jorge held Nate up on one shoulder.

“Tony, use a carabiner to secure the last O-ring to that
machine there,” Middleton ordered. “Loop it through and around.”

Tony did as directed and removed his vibro-knife from its
slot.  “Just let me know when to cut us loose.”

“Redhawk One, we’re going to need a hook up on a SPIE rig
coming to you,” Middleton radioed.

“Roger that.  Prepping ROHV now.  Stand-by.”

“ROHV?” Darren asked.

“Remotely-Operated Hydrazine Vehicle.  It’s a little
rocket pack trailing a tow cable.  Look for the flashing red light.”

Darren nodded his head.  “Alright, Jorge, tell Brutus
to put a hole in that hull.”

“Will do.”  Jorge sent the thought-command.

Two seconds went by.  Four seconds went by.

“Umm . . . .”

Brutus did not move.

“Is he still functional?” Middleton asked.

“Yeah, I can hear his insides humming,” Jorge replied. “He
still has power.”

Brutus suddenly popped his head up at an odd angle, and his
anti-graviton generators thrummed as the robot rose off the deck.  His
forward barrier snapped on, and he moved off the platform.  Enemy fire
from the hover knights began striking his weakened force field.

“Those laser pulses are going to drain his power!” Jorge
shouted.  “He won’t have enough juice to fire his disrupter cannon!”

Without warning, Brutus burst down the tunnel with the howl
of an electronic motorcycle.

“Where’s he going?” Darren exclaimed.

The Vorvon hover tanks opened fire on him.

“No!”

Brutus found second gear, and now the robot was hauling so
much ass, Darren could see a thin line of blue smoke pouring from the
overheated anti-graviton generators.  Two thousand feet from their platform,
Brutus suddenly veered upward and smashed into the giant coil above the tanks.

Flash!  God just took a picture from the largest camera
ever made.  Darren squinted before his visor could polarize and block the
intense light from his eyes.  A millionth of a second after the magnetic
field gave way, the ionized plasma flared at the break into a miniature sun, a
five thousand degree fireball that cauterized the tunnel walls into red hot
molten metal.  Thunder pulsed out and nearly blew them off their boots. 
More plasma rushed into the fireball, swelling the inferno until the walls
turned white hot.

The deafening squeal of rending metal echoed through the
blistering air.

“There it goes!” Middleton screamed.  “Get ready!”

A five hundred foot length of bright, molten hull suddenly
bulged outward and exploded.  The fireball rushed into space along with
millions of cubic feet of air.  The monstrous plasma stream followed the
fireball into the vacuum and began to sputter out as the magnetic field coursing
through the undamaged sections of coil abated.  Stray ionized gas,
infrared heat, dead aliens——anything not bolted down was sucked into the
void.  Everyone on the SPIE rig was picked off the deck and pulled toward
the gapping breach, bobbing about and spinning in the gale force wind.

“Now?” Tony shouted.

“Not yet!” Darren answered.  “Wait for the air to slow
down!”

“That could take forever!”

“Goddamn it, Tony, don’t cut us loose yet or we’ll go
shooting off into space!”  The counter on Darren’s visor read 00:08:17.

He saw spinning hover tanks and shadow spawn thrashing their
limbs helplessly in the hurricane rushing past them.  Darren squeezed his
eyes shut.  He should have felt no fear with his alien-modified
senses.  But the thought of the SPIE rig snapping or a carabiner bending
open quickened his heart rate and breathing.  If he was going to die, he
hoped for the prompt and painless variety——either having his neck snapped
against a bulkhead at two hundred miles an hour or plunging into the surface of
the sun——not a slow and suffocating death in the cold of space with the
reflection of Mother Earth shrinking on his visor.

Suddenly, the air slowed quickly, and Darren shouted, “Now!”

Tony gave his vibro-knife a short flick, and they hurdled
toward the rupture 1,500 feet down the tunnel.  Darren kicked the hover
pack on and steered them against the falling wind.  The machine growled
hard under the enormous weight.  He pulled them up higher, feeling the
escaping air dying quickly, praying the hover pack had enough power to keep
everyone airborne.

“Redhawk One, this is Space Cowboy,” Darren said. “SPIE rig
on the way!”

“Roger that, Space Cowboy.  ROHV deployed.”

Darren noticed the hover pack seemed to be straining less
and less and was actually gaining speed.  Gravity, produced by the mass
focal generators deep inside the moonship, was beginning to weaken the closer
they got to the hole.

Tony’s Dragonstar appeared through the gap and moved
silently toward them.

“There’s my ride!” he shouted.  “I’m cutting loose!”

Tony levitated away from them in near zero-g, carried by his
own momentum toward his approaching fighter.

They reached the gargantuan rupture, its smooth lumpy edges
still glowing red, and Darren cut hard to the left into open space.  The
edge of the black flying saucer lay less than a hundred feet away.  He
spotted the red flashing light to his ten o’clock and flew toward it.  The
ROHV, spooling out a steel cable and a fiberoptic wire, also sped in his
direction.  Darren passed his pulse rifle to Middleton so that he could
grab the loose O-ring on the end of the SPIE rig with his right hand.  As
soon as the boxy device spitting out hydrazine fuel came within arm’s reach,
Darren shoved the O-ring into the ROHV’s single carabiner.

“SPIE rig secure, Redhawk One!” Darren shouted.

The rocket pack jerked hard in reverse, reeling them in
toward the SC-138A’s airlock.  The Andromeda’s five electrostatic wave
propulsion engines fired, and Darren felt the hard g-forces course though his
body when the flying saucer transport pulled away.

Jorge let out a cowboy “Yee-haa!” and something said rapidly
in Spanish.

Twenty feet ahead, he spotted two crew chiefs standing in
the circular airlock . . . and the fleeting vision of a blue and white Earth
300,000 miles away.  The moonship behind them slowly began to shrink away.

His counter read 00:05:33.

*

Tony thought-guided his fighter straight to him.  The
windshield opened, and his beloved machine swooped in gently, swallowing him
into the cockpit.

“Yeah, bitches, back in the saddle again!”

As soon as he plugged the thought-control cable into the
back of his helmet, he felt his brain pour into the Dragonstar’s body. 
The pre-flight check sensors beeped an okay, and he pulled his fighter toward
the rupture.

And suddenly——impossibly!——there was the Guardian above him,
dropping literally out of nowhere, its arms outstretched and its fangs jutting
from salivating jaws.

Tony inhaled sharply and tried to draw a bead on the falling
creature with the laser cannons, tried to guess where it had been hiding, but
the Guardian quickly closed the distance and landed on his Dragonstar’s
nose.  Its weight forced that end of the fighter downward, but Tony
quickly compensated and shoved the mental-throttle forward, gaining
speed.  The beast raised a mighty fist to bash the windshield, but Tony
slammed the creature hard against the side of the tunnel.  The monster’s
repulsor field merely bounced it and the fighter’s mass away from the wall, but
still it clung to the Dragonstar’s nose.