Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2) (27 page)

“Are you a man of your word?” he asked, eyes rolling toward me.

“Yes, I am, actually.”

He nodded. “I thought as much. Only a true fool would have picked me up at all. Fine. I’ll tell you how to get out of this system—but you’re not going to like it.”

Curious, I approached the bars again.

-42-

As it turned out, Lorn was correct. I didn’t like the method of escape he described to me.

“You’re sure there’s no other way?” I asked him.

“Positive. We’ll both live, but only if you follow my instructions explicitly.”

“This doesn’t seem quite above-board,” I observed. “Why would you agree to harm your own people this way? I thought a Stroj was down for the cause with his life. That he would sacrifice anything and everything for his homeworld and brethren.”

Lorn laughed at that. “How greatly you misunderstand us. We’re not mindless soldiers. Robots march in a perfect hive-mind—not the Stroj. We’re quite the opposite, in fact. We are individualistic to a fault.”

Honestly curious, I pressed him further. “I’ve always wondered about the philosophy and psychology of your culture,” I admitted. “What keeps you together if not a sense of devotion to a cause?”

“We are devoted to a cause—ourselves!” he explained. “You see, it’s all about status. It’s rather like being a committed capitalist. Think, what drives a narcissist?”

“Self-aggrandizement?”

“Yes,” he said. “We Stroj like to one-up each other. Nothing makes us feel better than that—to know we’ve dominated a rival. Among our own people, this takes the form of being promoted over one another. If one commands a ship, that captain takes great pride in the trophies he has carried home with it.”

“What about a Stroj who commands a mop?”

“That’s even more clear. We’re all concerned with our status among our peers. A man with a mop wants to put all other mop-men to shame. Perhaps even to rise above all others utilizing that very mop.”

“I see,” I said, “you’re individual warriors, rather than soldiers in formation.”

“Exactly. Cheating is therefore acceptable, as long as that cheating is never discovered. Since you’re a man of honor, I can be assured you’ll never tell another of my people. I’m free to invent whatever story I want about my daring escape. Your silence will support my case, and my status will be elevated.”

I could tell he was salivating at the deal. He’d been assured of a defeat, but now, he thought he had a way out.

“I still don’t understand one thing, however,” I said, “why were you so willing to die to kill me?”

“Again, you have to understand our perspective is different than your own. We fight like wolves, but when we see our final moments are upon us, we stretch our minds to find the best way possible to die. Killing one last enemy is often the best choice that can be made—particularly if it’s an exceptional kill.”

Nodding slowly, I was reminded of the nihilistic culture of the Vikings. They, too, would rather die with a sword in their hands, fighting to the death. Any other way out was disgraceful.

“All right then,” I said, “as strange as it may seem, we’ve struck a bargain. How shall we proceed?”

He began to tell me, and it got worse as the discussion progressed. Before we got to the end of it, the cellblock hatchway opened.

I frowned at the guard. “I gave explicit instructions we weren’t to be interrupted.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said sheepishly. “Her excellency refused to be put off.”

My aunt slipped past him, appearing far more hunched than usual. She hobbled toward me with a cane rapping loudly on the floor and looking quite angry.

“Have you been injured Aunt Helen?” I asked.

“Don’t ‘Aunt Helen’ me, William,” she said. “As if you care about my health. That last stunt you pulled, zipping by the dreadnought, that nearly killed me!”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Oh, by the way, this is Captain—”

“I know who he is! Do I understand correctly that you’ve been conducting unsanctioned negotiations down here with this creature?”

“I’d hardly describe them as negotiations. Our discussions have been of a personal nature.”

“What?” she demanded. “Are you going to marry this monster?”

Captain Lorn laughed then. “Sparhawk! You’ve been holding out on me. Such a ravishing beauty. She’s full of fire and spunk, too.”

She turned each of us a baleful eye. I noted that one of her eyes wasn’t opening properly. It was bloodshot and weeping. I thought that was probably a side effect of our violent maneuvering earlier. High-G accelerations took a toll on oldsters, but she was still kicking.

“This fiend is
my
responsibility now,” Lady Grantholm insisted. “I’ll handle all further negotiations.”

I threw up my hands. “Fine, but I suggest you don’t get too close to the bars.”

She watched me leave.

“Kind Lady,” Lorn said, “would you be so considerate as to switch off that abominable box? It’s making it hot in here, and I’m very uncomfortable.”

My Aunt leered at him. “Don’t take me for a fool. Stroj,” she said. “I’ve been talking to monsters like you since before your planet was discovered.”

This seemed to surprise and amuse Lorn. I left the two of them together. Their personalities were more alike than they were different, after all.

“Command staff, report,” I ordered when I stepped onto the command deck.

Durris lurched up from my seat with a painful jerk. I could tell his broken neck was still bothering him.

“No major changes, sir,” he said.

“How’s that spine of yours?” I asked, trying to hide my dismay at his odd appearance.

He seemed surprised at my question. “It’s not bothering me much right now. I’ve got neural pain-clamps and nano-strings holding together the vertebrae—thanks for inquiring, sir.”

Modern medicine allowed spacers to walk away from injuries that would have taken months or years to heal in the past, but there were always alarming side effects. It was disconcerting to watch his head loll and twist, despite the fact I knew the artificial fibers in his vertebrae were strong enough to keep him from further damaging his spinal cord.

“Excellent,” I said, trying not to wince as I looked at him. “Now, proceed to these coordinates.”

I handed him a computer scroll. Frowning, he unrolled it and tapped at the data he found there. He looked up at me in alarm.

“Captain...? This will take us to their base—to the spot where we first spotted the dreadnought.”

“Exactly. That’s the only way out.”

I explained in detail, leaving out any mention of my bargain with Lorn. He already thought I was a madman for following this scheme, there wasn’t any point to confirming his suspicions.

After several baffled looks, he moved to his nav table and tapped in the data. “Here,” he said, “there’s a small nickel-iron moon around the second planet in the system. It’ll be hot and highly radioactive.”

Nodding, I examined what little data we had on the region. We had more than when we first entered the star system, but it still wasn’t much.

“Surface temperature around the boiling point of water,” I said. “Atmosphere made up primarily of carbon dioxide mixed with nitrogen and other trace elements. Upper cloud layer is sulfuric acid, and it rains acid on a daily basis. Sounds like a vacation spot.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You think the Stroj really live on that burning rock?”

“I don’t think they’re here for the gardening, but that’s where the majority of them are—on that moon.”

Durris shrugged. “We can get there, but the dreadnought will gain on us. We’ll only have a few hours’ time to spare before we’ll have to get underway again. Otherwise, she’ll catch up to us and pound us with her big guns.”

“All right. Set the course and give it to Rumbold. I need to go talk to Lieutenant Morris.”

He watched me leave with a strange look on his face. I thought maybe he suspected—not much got past Durris.

When I explained the situation to Morris and described his role in the scheme, he expressed disbelief.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Captain!”

“Sadly, I’m not.”

He strutted around the room, waving his arms and shouting at the walls.

“We can’t do it. The mere suggestion is crazy. You expect us to raid an enemy base—after they watch us fly right into their teeth? When we get down there we’re to capture some kind of computer code key and escape? It would take ten thousand commandos, not a handful of marines.”

“I’ll bolster your ranks with regular spacers,” I suggested.

“No, no, no,” he said, waving away my offer. “Don’t screw me further with baggage. We’ll have to move fast. We’ll have to get in and get out within ten hours.”

Sucking in a deep breath, I told him the rest of it. “We don’t have ten hours over the site. We’ve got three and a half—tops. After that, the dreadnought will be all over us.”

“You can’t be serious. Captain, I can’t land a force, run across a dozen craters, then penetrate a defended base—”

“You won’t have to do all that,” I told him. “We’re taking the pinnace. Lorn will get us down by spoofing their friend-or-foe recognition system. Then we’ll steal the key and run for it.”

His eyes narrowed. “We?”

“Lorn and I will be coming along. He has to identify and secure the code-key, after all.”

He stared at me. “You trust Lorn?”

“Certainly not.”

“He’ll bolt the first chance he gets. He’ll give us away—something like that.”

“He may try to go off-script. But he has a strong reason for not doing so: he wants to live and collect trophies.”

Morris shook his head. “Trophies? What trophies?”

I told him, and he was even more incredulous than before.

But also, he was somewhat intrigued.

-43-

Reaching the moon was simple enough. We swooped down out of deep space, took up a position in orbit near and began bombarding it. They had defensive batteries, but they were nothing that could stand up to a battle cruiser.

The pinnace was our sole landing transport. We hadn’t anticipated needing a flotilla of small invasion craft for this duty. As a result, I was forced to make do with what we had and wait until we’d been ejected directly over the target. The
Defiant
was our only cover fire, but I wasn’t complaining.

As time was of the essence, we launched the pinnace the moment we were on the far side of the moon. Then when
Defiant
swung around again, the defenders had their attention diverted. They were too busy trying to survive to concern themselves much with the pinnace that zoomed down and unloaded its tiny complement of marines onto the rocky, airless surface.

We landed in a crater about two kilometers from the main enemy base. It wasn’t far, but far enough to avoid their anti-space weaponry due to the sharp curvature of the small moon.

Deploying a landing vehicle, we rolled forward on spinning balloon tires. The wheels were laced with magnets and hooked spikes so they could cling to the surface of a low-gravity planetoid like this one.

A few minutes later we found ourselves at the base of an escarpment.

“Okay,” Morris said, “on the far side of this ridge is the enemy base. It’s in a crater, and this rise in the land is where the enemy fire might find us. The plan is to scramble over the edge and rush down while they’re still firing up at
Defiant
.”

Lorn shook his head and laughed. “You’re a fool if that’s your plan.”

“What have you got, pirate?” Morris asked angrily.

“Brains,” he said, limping up to the top of the crater and then hunkering down at the lip. He peered over the side, absorbed.

Morris and I scrambled up the shifting rocks and dust to join him.

“See that?” he asked, indicating a hexagonal structure. “That’s a defensive bunker. A pillbox. The domes beyond it comprise the base itself.”

Morris stared, aghast. “Defensive bunkers? You never mentioned anything of the kind.”

Lorn shrugged. “Any commander worthy of the title would have assumed this base would be defended.”

“Never mind,” I said, cutting off Morris’ incoming tirade. “How do we get past their defenses?”

“We jog around the crater to the other side, that’s what,” Morris suggested.

“A waste of time,” Lorn said. “There are six of these pillboxes located in prime positions all around the base.”

Heaving a sigh, I gestured for him to continue.

“
Defiant
must continue her bombardment—but she has to come in closer to engage the gun mounts in the bunkers. They can only be taken out with multiple direct hits, or an attack that gets under their shields. If we rush the operators while they’re engaged with your ship, they might not even see us coming. We’ll take them out and enter the base beyond.”

“Ah-ha!” shouted Morris. “Now I know how you really intend to collect your scalps on this rock. You want us to die, then you’ll pick up
our
scraps.”

Lorn’s strange eyes glittered. “You bring up an excellent suggestion,” he said, “sadly, some of your people are likely to survive. I’ll stick with the original proposal.”

He eyed me, and I nodded.

“You’ll have your trophies,” I said. “Get on with it.”

Morris’ men were well-disciplined, but clearly they were worried by their assigned task. They gathered up in a line hidden by the ridge surrounding the crater. On Morris’ signal, they were to rise up as one and charge once cover-fire commenced.

Being on a tiny world with very little gravity helped. They would take great bounds as they rushed the pillbox. Usually, their powerful leaps would have taken them right off the moon’s surface and off into space. It was easy to gain escape velocity and launch yourself into orbit if you weren’t careful.

But my marines had some specialized gear. Automated jets of gas puffed upward from their shoulders, pressing the spacers firmly down on the ground.

After calling in the change of plan to
Defiant
, we waited for the ship to descend. It did so rapidly. Durris seemed eager to engage the Stroj base directly. I knew Zye was operating the ship’s weapons, and it was a terrifying sight to behold.

A rain of fire began lighting up shielding and rocky armor all over the moon base.

“That’s it!” Lorn shouted. “Now, rush in there and take out that bunker!”

He stayed crouched on the lip of the crater and looked at us expectantly. I stepped close to him, waving for Morris to hold on.

“You first, Lorn,” I said.

“What? Are you mad? Stroj commanders go
last
, Sparhawk. I’ll go when you do.”

Nodding, I accepted his challenge. “Follow me then,” I said, and rose from hiding.

Heart pounding, I began a skidding, stumbling run downslope and quickly picked up speed. I turned down the pressure on my stabilizer jets and took bigger leaps as I ran. Covering ten meters or more with every bound, I knew I was getting too high and was therefore too visible, but sometimes speed of attack was more important than stealth.

Behind me, the Stroj Captain reluctantly followed. Morris’ men surrounded him and ran with him, making sure he didn’t try anything treacherous.

The bunker’s primary armament, a Gatling gun of tremendous size, pumped thousands of rounds up into the sky. A shower of sparks rang off
Defiant
in the distance, where she paraded and presented an obvious target. From all around the crater, similar streams of fire converged and blazed away at the ship.

Any battle cruiser worth talking about could have pulverized this base, naturally. But we weren’t here to destroy the place—at least not until we had the code-keys we needed.

With surprising rapidity, I found my charge coming to an end. The bunker loomed, and seemed much larger close-up.

It wasn’t until my final, bounding steps were taken that the troops crewing the Gatling gun noticed what was happening. They slewed their gun down and around in an arc. Blazing fire flashed over my head, silent in the vacuum of space, but still deadly in the extreme.

Ducking, I found I was underneath their arc of fire. The turret hadn’t been built to shoot at something so close and low.

My marines, however, weren’t so fortunate. The rippling wave of pellets swept across their ragged line. Seven went down, shredded by a line of deadly orange sparks. The dusty surface of the moon behind them was churned into a gray cloud of dust, and their blood boiled away in the blazing heat of the moon’s surface. Each fallen figure was shrouded in a dark, bejeweled mist.

Running into the bunker’s shields, I pushed doggedly through them. The feeling of cobwebs crawled over my skin, even through my helmet and suit.

Coughing, rasping and choking from exertion, my troops soon joined me. We were all sweating now, our suit air-conditioners unable to keep up with the blistering radiation of the nearby twin suns.

We hugged the base of the rocky foundation under the bunker, relishing the shade and letting ourselves slowly cool down. Morris stepped up to me. I was glad to see he’d survived.

“You stay here, sir,” he said. “My marines will take out this gun nest—what’s left of it.”

He said this last with a dark glance toward Lorn, who seemed not to notice. Like most Stroj I’d met, he wasn’t an empathetic creature.

While Morris’ men unloaded equipment from their backpacks and began climbing up the sheer wall with spiked gauntlets, I watched Lorn. He seemed excited and pleased.

“Surprised we got this far?” I asked him.

“Not at all. You Earthmen are weak and gullible, but you’re competent in the essentials of warfare. How else could you have spawned the likes of us?”

There was an explosion above us. We couldn’t hear it, except as a muffled vibration coming up through our boots, but we could see the glare of the blast. A cloud of dust formed around the bunker.

A tumbling figure fell from the upper part of the turret. I ran, ready to grab hold of the fallen marine, who bounced off the hard rock and spun up into the air again. With his stabilizers shut down, I was worried he might drift away into space.

When I pressed his body down into the dark moon dust, he stayed there, motionless. His vitals were in the yellow, but he was alive and stable. I turned to look over my shoulder at the bunker.

The bunker had been destroyed by an explosive charge. Morris and his men were leaping away from it, whooping in my headphones about a job well done.

But when my eyes fell from them to the base of the tower, they froze there.

Lorn had vanished.