Doom Star: Book 05 - Planet Wrecker (36 page)

A cyborg jumped before Marten. Its laser-beam burned a good meter above his prone body. There was a scream in Marten’s headphones. He had no idea what had just happened. He didn’t really care. He just lifted his gyroc and fired. But the cyborg jumped fast behind a coil. The gyroc round whooshed past the thing’s former position and exploded against a coil farther back. The coil emitted bolts like sparks, and Marten rolled wildly out of the way, barely avoiding the energy-bolts as they hit the floor like lightening from some god’s hand.

Gripping his rifle with manic strength, Marten cursed and jumped to his feet. Always do the unexpected with cyborgs. It was something he’d learned the hard way. They were logic wizards, and had incredible computing ability. Marten leaped at the coil the cyborg had used. The cyborg took that moment to roll around the edge, aim its carbine at the floor where Marten would have been, and adjusted with insect-like speed as it spotted Marten coming down from a high leap.

Three APEX (Armor-Piercing EXplosive) shells spewed from the rifle. They penetrated the cyborg’s armor and blasted the thing apart. As it tumbled backward, Marten landed, pumping three more rounds into it. Through bitter lessons, Marten had learned to make triple-certain a cyborg was in pieces before he declared it dead.

Terrible explosions began to occur throughout the coil chamber. There didn’t seem to be any rationality as to why one area blew and another didn’t. Space marines were fried. Cyborgs melted.

“Get out here!” Marten shouted. “Get outside!”

He had no idea if anyone heard him. As his suit’s air-conditioner unit thrummed, as the chamber became an intense red wall of heat and flame, Marten loped in almost zero gravity. The sweat poured down his body now, and the air burned down his throat, almost too hot to breathe.

He spied a heavy door. A cyborg set up a plasma-cannon there. Other charging space marines shot madly, and the cyborg went down.

The vacc-suit’s functions were approaching critical. Marten blinked, and blinked again as sweat stung his eyes. He wasn’t sure what happened next. There were gaps in his consciousness. Then he loped over the dead cyborg and shoved his shoulder against the heavy door, slowly opening it to another compartment in the asteroid’s vast engine complex.

The coil chamber was murder, a gauntlet of death that halved the number of Jovian space marines. Marten and Omi dragged out heat-fatigued men from the hellhole. Then coils in the middle of the chamber began to explode.

“Shut the door,” said Osadar.

“Nadia!” cried Marten. “I haven’t seen Nadia.”

Osadar shoved Marten away as more coils erupted in the vast chamber. With cyborg strength and speed, she slammed the heavy door shut and engaged the locks.

Marten’s last vision was of a space marine on the floor, raising his arm for aid and the door closing on his last hope. Then explosions caused the hall to tremble, and the door buckled and seemed as if it would blow into them. But it held.

As if in a dream, Marten turned toward Osadar. He was aware of the rifle in his hands, and he contemplated aiming it at the cyborg.

“We would have all died if Osadar hadn’t done that,” Omi said.

Marten’s tongue was thick in his mouth. “Nadia,” he whispered. Had that been her raising her arm to plead with him to help her? He never should have brought her to this nightmare. He—

“Sound off,” Omi said through the headphones. “Let’s see who made it. First Platoon, begin.”

“Thebes here,” said the Group-Leader.

“Jason.”

“Cleon.”

“Marten, where are you?”

That was Nadia’s voice. Marten’s arms went limp as he looked around. “Nadia,” he said, using his override function. “Raise your arm.”

In the back of a group of space marines, Nadia raised her arm. Her vacc-suit was black and one of the lines had torn free. But she was alive.

As the others continued to sound off, Marten waded through a group of marines and clutched Nadia’s gloved hand.

“You’re alive,” he said.

She nodded her helmeted head.

“What do we do now?” A half moment later, someone strong turned Marten around. The armored speaker was tall. It was Osadar. “What do we do now?” she asked again.

Marten had to think about it. Nadia was alive. To keep her alive, he had to kill all the cyborgs. “Right,” he said. “We made it through the exhaust. Now its time to come out of here like the Japanese did to us. Do you remember?”

“Japan?” asked Osadar.

“That’s right,” Marten said. “You weren’t with us then. It was Stick and Turbo during the Japan Campaign.”

“What do we do here on Asteroid E?” asked Osadar.

“We make like rats,” Marten said. Nadia was alive. It was time to keep fighting. “Right,” Marten said. “Here’s the next step.”

Everyone checked his weapons, taking out damaged parts and fitting in replacement pieces. Then they reloaded as Omi paired depleted squads together. Sometimes only one member of a squad had survived. This was gruesome, bitter work.

“We’ve made it this far,” Marten told them. “And we’ve killed cyborgs. There can’t be that many left.”

He had no idea if that was true or not, but it was good for morale if the men believed it. They’d lost over half the space marines who had made it onto the asteroid. If you counted all the space marines and ship personnel who had made the journey from Jupiter, less than a third had survived this far.

They used stairwells, avoiding lifts, and climbed for the domes. These were the veterans from the cyborg assault in the Jovian System. They’d fought the melded machine-men before and survived, some of them more than once. They’d absorbed Marten’s refined tactics and had trained religiously before and during the trip here. Each knew what to do. Few panicked anymore, and each had his own method for dealing with the aliens from Neptune, in this instance from Saturn, too.

Marten signaled by pumping a gloved fist. He stood near the hatch that by the specs in his HUD said led into the first dome. Then he raised his index finger and made a circular motion. These were Highborn-taught signals that Marten had learned in his shock trooper days in the Sun-Works Factory.

Omi and three other space marines crouched nearby. Each gripped a grenade cluster.

Marten hardened his resolve, braced himself against Osadar and shoved open the hatch. Then Omi and the others lunged forward, hurling their grenade clusters into the room. Flashes occurred, one right after the other.

With a ragged cry, Marten sprang through, his gyroc firing. The room held screens, monitors and a vast computer array. There were clear bubbles with layered tissues of programmed brain-mass in them. Marten counted seven. All around were computer-banks, cryogenic-units and medical facilities. Tubes pulsed with red liquid. Green gels shifted in the bubbles and tiny rays beamed back and forth from odd antenna.

Marten’s trigger finger moved four times before his brain registered the thought:
This is a Web-Mind
. Even as he realized it, the bubbles shattered and brain-mass exploded outward. Then other space marines added to the mayhem, blowing away computer banks and medical units.

It was a glorious moment, and it made Marten grin harshly. He grinned even as he realized that this moment had been dearly paid for in human blood and agony. He hoped the vile mass of brain-tissue felt pain. He hoped it hurt like hell.

Marten, Nadia and Omi sat in a control room in the third dome. Dead cyborgs lay scattered on the floor. A window showed the asteroid’s bleak surface of crater-plain and the star-field above. The room held breathable air.

With a hiss, Marten unsealed his helmet, rotated it off the locks and lifted it from his head. The room reeked of burnt electronics. But Marten didn’t care. He scratched his nose and rubbed tired eyes.

Nadia and Omi acted similarly. Nadia had dark circles around her eyes. A cut on Omi’s forehead dripped blood into one of his brows.

“We did it,” Omi whispered. “We took our asteroid.”

“Maybe,” Marten said. “We haven’t checked everywhere. There may be some cyborgs hiding.”

Omi shook his head. “They attacked when it might have been better for them to wait for us. I think they’ve thrown every cyborg into the fray.”

Nadia stood up, moved near and half-collapsed into Marten’s arms. He kissed her salty lips as she wept silently.

“I thought I was going to die,” she whispered.

“We all did,” said Marten. He hugged her. It was difficult with her armored vacc-suit. Their pieces clanged against each other. He was overjoyed she was alive. If she’d died…what would have been the point of all this?

“It’s time,” a tinny voice crackled from each of their helmet’s headphones.

Marten lifted a hand-unit. “What was that?” he asked.

“The fusion core is online,” said Osadar.

“What about the damaged coils?” Marten asked.

“There are some secondary banks,” said Osadar. “I’ve already rerouted.”

“You should send a message to the Highborn,” Nadia said. “Otherwise, they might bombard the asteroid if we move it without first announcing it.”

“I don’t agree,” said Marten. “By moving the asteroid, we show we won. And I don’t like the idea about broadcasting our victory.”

“Why not?” asked Omi.

“Maybe the cyborgs will send torpedoes from the other asteroids,” Marten said.

“They’ll more likely do that once we’re moving,” Omi said.

“But at least the asteroid will be moving by then,” said Marten. “That’s the point.”

“What do we do after that?” asked Omi. “Ride the asteroid to its new heading?”

“You know the answer,” Marten said. “Once our asteroid is safely headed to a new destination, we climb into the patrol boats and storm another asteroid.”

“We don’t have enough space marines left for that,” Omi said. “Look how many we lost capturing this one.”

“We’ll have to coordinate with others,” Marten said.

“Has anyone else won?” asked Omi.

“If we did it, Highborn should have been able to,” Marten said.

“We tackled a small asteroid,” Nadia said. “They hit the big ones.”

“It is time,” Osadar radioed.

Desperately wanting nothing more than to sleep, Marten stood up just the same. Then he approached the asteroid’s primary controls. Mankind’s future rested on their ability to decipher cyborg routing.

Captain Mune witnessed it from a nearby asteroid, the one designated as D. Grand Admiral Cassius watched from the
Julius Caesar
as he sat in his shell, examining holoimages. Supreme Commander Hawthorne saw it on the screens deep in the Joho Mountains.

Asteroid E rotated as huge jets flared. Seventeen minutes later, a flicker appeared in the giant, crater-sized exhaust-port. Then a vast plume erupted from the asteroid. It lengthened to over one hundred kilometers. With the thrust, Asteroid E so very slowly began to change its heading and velocity. Given enough time on this new vector, it would glide past the Earth and no longer impact with the third planet from the Sun.

Unfortunately, it was only one asteroid out of seventeen, and time was fast running out.

As the battle raged on the asteroids speeding for Earth, Hawthorne accepted a fateful call from Cone.

She was in the Japanese Home Islands, Highborn-controlled territory. During these past few days, Cone and her teams had made contact with Free Earth Corps people. Now she called with interesting information, and spoke via a tight-link security beam to Hawthorne in his office in the Joho Command Bunker.

***

CONE: I’m afraid I must keep this short, sir. My expert has established the fact of nearly constant enemy surveillance of my whereabouts and communications. The FEC soldiers and their loyalty monitors are nervous.

HAWTHORNE: Are you in immediate jeopardy?

CONE: Every minute I’m here. The islands are heavily militarized, full of military police and secret service personnel. The first runs loyalty checks on the soldiers and the second searches for spies and saboteurs.

HAWTHORNE: Perhaps we should try to establish contact with the security services.

CONE: The FEC soldiers don’t recommend it.

HAWTHORNE: Why not?

CONE: Sir, my expert has assured me I’m clean of listening devices—for the moment. But the tails will close in soon and likely frisk us more thoroughly. This will be my only call from the islands where I can guarantee a tight link.

HAWTHORNE: I understand. What do you have for me?

CONE: As I said, the FEC soldiers are nervous. Everything is in turmoil and the Highborn have left Earth as we surmised. I can fully substantiate that now. The soldiers I’ve spoken to are certain the asteroids will strike the planet. Why otherwise would the Highborn have completely evacuated Earth?

HAWTHORNE: And these soldiers are willing to turn?

CONE: (pauses) They’re sensitive to terminology. Perhaps it’s their long association with the super soldiers. They bristle at the idea of disloyalty to the Highborn or any idea that they’ve betrayed Earth through their hostilities.