Three Against the Stars (3 page)

“Bond—you’re on sentry duty,” Baim said.

Private Bond nodded and raced outside while Baim and the other Marines secured the entrance. Akira, Cortez and O’Hara joined Makki as he worked to patch up the wounded Drakonian. But to Makki’s trained eye, the lizardman would not live beyond the night.

“He tells me the outpost was attacked by many Cindari,” Makki told the sergeants. “Drakonians leave dead behind.”

“Who took all their belongings?” Cortez asked, searching the abandoned building.

“The Cindari, no doubt,” Akira said.

“Yes,” the Drakonian hissed in Standard English.

“Your own Draks left you behind?” O’Hara asked.

“Thought me—dead,” replied the proto-saurian.

“Look what I have found!” said Cortez. He showed them a handful of urathium crystals. “I think I will take these with me. They are very valuable, no?”

“Only to Drakonians,” Akira told him. “Your life is worth much more.”

“Not by much it ain’t,” O’Hara said.

Disappointment written all over his face, Cortez threw the crystals onto the floor.

Piece by piece, they learned from the wounded lizardman that the Drakonians had received orders to abandon the outpost, but before they could do so hundreds of Cindari had attacked them. The mutants battered down the doors and rushed in before the Drakonians knew what hit them. Though they slew many Cindari, the lizardmen were vastly outnumbered. Only a few managed to escape in their intergalactic freighter. That was two nights ago.

“Maybe Cindari use metal beam outside as battering ram?” Makki suggested.

Akira nodded. “Then they carried off their own dead after destroying the outpost.”

“So where did the Draks go?” O’Hara asked. “Back to Drakona?”

Before the dying Drakonian could answer, the night exploded with the sound of weapons’ fire and the howling voices of banshees.

Makki and the three sergeants turned toward the entrance. Then Derek Bond came running and screaming into the outpost, clutching what looked like a tomahawk buried in his face. He toppled to the floor and made no other sound. Baim, Chen, Kowalski and Khan poured on the heat, firing through the opened doorway as scores of Cindari raced up the stairs to attack the outpost. Yowling like madmen and wild animals, they closed in on the entrance, hurling spears and clubs, shooting arrows, and brandishing knifes made of stone or pieces of metal.

…the outpost was attacked by many Cindari.

“Fall back!” Baim yelled as the Cindari charged into the face of heavy fire.

Baim and her team quickly backed away from the entrance and moved to the rear of the dome, firing their weapons as more and more Cindari stormed the outpost.

They were a horde of crazed mutants, the Cindari—heedless and reckless of the death they faced. They resembled troglodytes, with skin mottled white, gray and green. Their flesh was stretched so tightly over their bones that they appeared to be living skeletons. Completely hairless, they were all but naked except for the scraps and tatters of animal hides and Drakonian uniforms they wore. Their eyes were bulging orbs of sulfurous yellow, and their ape-like faces had elongated jaws with black, dagger-like fangs.

Akira and Cortez covered Makki as he did his best to shield the wounded Drakonian. They unleashed a salvo of laser and Eddy machine gun fire. O’Hara drew his .45 automatic, unable to use his Primo-2000 until Baim and her team reached them.

The Marines blasted the Cindari as fast as the mutants could invade the outpost. Their dead began to litter the floor. But that didn’t stop them.

“Rosie—fire up the Questron and call for reinforcements!” Kowalski shouted.

Chen struggled to remove the Questron when an arrow tagged her shoulder and knocked her to the ground. Then a spear tore through her leg, nearly cutting it off at the knee.

“I’m hit!” she screamed.

Makki left the dying Drakonian and rushed to Chen’s side, dragging her back into the corner while the others covered them and tried to keep the enemy at bay. He had no concern for his own life as he worked to save Chen’s, ignoring the firefight that raged all around him.

Akira and Cortez laid down a sizzling barrage of red laser fire and yellow machine gun bullets. O’Hara’s automatic sent many a Cindari screaming into oblivion. Baim, Khan and Kowalski hit the Cindari with round after blistering round of retaliatory fire. Cindari bodies fell and piled up by the score, their madness and bloodlust driving them straight into the jaws of superior weapons and certain death. And still, they kept on coming.

The Marines were trapped as the Cindari poured through the entrance.

O’Hara finally primed and pumped his Primo-2000—and the mini-bazooka launched three rounds of ordinance that blasted a half-dozen Cindari back through the entrance. Heads and limbs flew like bloody shrapnel though the air. Then a sharp metal weapon resembling a boomerang sailed through the air and struck Jerry Khan in the neck, shearing off his head. Akira yelled in anger and poured it on, strafing the Cindari as if she were watering a lawn.

Cortez, Kowalski and Baim poured it on thick and heavy. The red and yellow flashes from the muzzles of their weapons lit up the outpost as Cindari after Cindari tumbled to the floor with holes burned in their heads and torsos. Their skeletal arms and legs were scorched to bare bone, their flesh fried and melted. Spears and arrows filled the air like a swarm of hornets.

Then O’Hara fired two more rounds of explosive shells. The first tore through the Cindari like a bolt of lightning thrown by Zeus, melting their bodies in a fiery explosion. The second round slammed into the ceiling above the entrance, where it burst and brought down part of the roof, burying the last of the Cindari under a small mountain of dust and rock.

It was all over within minutes.

Baim yanked the portable Questron transmitter from Chen’s back, powered it up, and sent out an SOS. “Stray Dog to Catcher One. Mayday! Mayday! Home in on this signal and come get us—immediately, if not sooner!” she said.

“How’s Rosie?” Akira asked Makki.

“She will live,” he said. “But it will be a long time before she fights again.”

“Why did they attack us, the Cindari?” Cortez asked. “We offered them no harm.”

“They—thought you came to enslave them—make dig for—urathium crystals,” the Drakonian muttered. He coughed and spit up green blood.

Makki shook his head. The Drakonian did not have much time left.

“Why were you ordered to bug out?” Akira asked the Drakonian.

“Received word—of your coming. I know not . . . how.”

“Look, your own people left you here to die,” Akira reasoned with the Drakonian. “Tell us—did they return to Drakona or flee to some other planet?”

The Drakonian shook his head slowly and held his silence.

“That ain’t gonna work,” O’Hara said.

Setting his Primo aside, he rolled up the sleeve of his prosthetic limb and flicked his wrist. A panel in the left bicep opened, and a knife slid into his hand. He grabbed the Drakonian’s horn and showed him the knife.

“Tell us why you Draks are smuggling weapons and materiel into the neutral zone and who you’re selling them to,” he said. “Or by God and Saint Patrick—I’ll cut off your horn!”

Makki gasped in disbelief at O’Hara, though he understood the reason for the Irishman’s threat: Without his horn, the Drakonian would be unable to find his way to the Otherworld, and would be forced to wander the Shadowlands for all time.

The Drakonian’s green scales turned gray. His cold, reptilian eyes stared off into some other dimension. Makki was about to close the Drakonian’s eyes when the lizardman suddenly coughed up more blood.

“Island 881,” he wheezed. Then he gasped for breath and said no more.

Makki bowed his head and said a prayer for the soul of the Drakonian.

“Well that tears it!” O’Hara growled. “That’s an island on Grant’s Planet. Now we’ll be sent off to that miserable speck of worthless real estate.”

“Lieutenant Hooks will make a good plan, once he learns of this,” Makki said.

O’Hara glared at him. “What do you know, ya fuzzy little ferret?”

“Makki’s right, O’Hara,” Akira said. “One clue led us here. Another one points to Grant’s Planet. Hooks will know what to do.”

“And then where will
that
take us?” Cortez wanted to know.

“Quiet!” Makki snarled, ears standing straight up. He looked up and listened intently. “This one hears the roaring of Comanche One.” 

“It’s about time,” Kowalski mumbled.

The noise of engines and propulsion units, and the grinding of landing gear being lowered, echoed in the night outside the Drakonian outpost.

Chapter Three

Across The Universe

T
he Terran Empire Starcruiser,
Harper’s Ferry
, slid through normal space as quietly as an eel through still waters. She was near the outer rim of the Cytran Galaxy, quickly approaching the Tobey-Arness Wormhole. From there she would make another jump into hyperspace and then return to normal space on the fringe of the Vahndari Galaxy. The
Harper’s Ferry
would then rendezvous with the starship
Desert Shield,
and transfer her cargo of Marines, supplies, munitions, and weaponry. After that, she would move on to her next assignment.

The training room of the
Harper’s Ferry
was a huge, cavernous affair, with a white mat spread out across the deck, and bulkhead walls covered in gray padding. Brightly lit, it was a cold and sterile environment. It was empty except for two people trying to kill each other.

Makki threw a right cross at Akira, who blocked it with an arm. She feinted with a blow to his belly and then kicked him in the knee. When he went down she twirled around with a second kick that caught him on the side of the head, knocking him to the mat. If not for their padded helmets and body armor, Makki would have been calling for medical assistance.

Akira held out a hand and helped him to his feet. “You okay?” she asked.

“This one not hurt,” Makki replied. “Sergeant certainly knows how to take up a foe.”

“Take
down
a foe, Makki.”

“This mewling stands corrected.”

“Ready?”

Makki nodded, they bowed to each other, and then Akira leapt into the air with legs rigid and feet aimed at his face. Dodging aside at the last possible moment, Makki caught her by the waist with one arm and used the other to flip her over, throwing her to the mat, where she landed flat on her back. He threw himself on top of her, trapped her legs beneath his, and then gripped her shoulders, one arm crossed over the other. With his wrists locked over her throat, he was in a perfect position to crush her windpipe.

“Well done!” she said.

“This one is grateful for the compliment,” Makki told her.

With a grin, he helped her to her feet. They bowed to each other again—and this time Akira faked him out with left and right jabs, and then took him down with a swift kick to his left kneecap. When Makki dropped to his knees, Akira circled behind him, grabbed his head and pulled it backward with one hand. Makki moved his right hand behind him and toward her left leg. Akira traced his throat with the fingers of her free hand.

“Now if I were holding a knife, you’d be dead,” she told him.

Makki squeezed her leg, right on the femoral artery. “And if this paw were a knife, you would be took down with me,” he said.

A round of applause and laughter echoed in the room. They turned toward the entrance.

“Ah, trouble has come a calling,” Akira said.

“One cannot hide from those two,” Makki said, a bit displeased with the interruption. He was just getting warmed up and was anxious to learn more hand-to-hand self-defense.

Cortez and O’Hara walked over to them, still laughing and clapping their hands.

“I am very much pleased with your progress, Makki,” Cortez told the young Rhajni. “Akira is an excellent teacher.”

“This one thanks you, Sergeant Cortez,” Makki said.

O’Hara glared at them both.

“How did a man with a brain no larger than a quark manage to find us aboard this massive starship, O’Hara?” Akira asked.

“You’re a saucy wench, lass, I’ll give ya that much,” the big Irishman said. “But even with both hands tied behind me back, and my ears bound and gagged, I’d be able to find you two at the other end of a black hole.”

Cortez looked at Makki, who turned to Akira. She shook her head and shrugged.

“Well, now that you two have gone and had your fun, it’s time you were washin’ up,” O’Hara told Akira. “Lieutenant Hooks is holding a briefing at 0900 hours.”

“That gives us an hour, Makki,” Akira said. “Let’s grab some chow, first.”

“Makki ain’t invited to the briefing,” O’Hara told her.

Akira arched one eyebrow. “Oh? Why is that?”

“Because he ain’t a Marine, that’s why!”

Makki’s green and yellow eyes shot lasers at O’Hara. As much as he admired and respected O’Hara, even liked him, he would have loved to get his paws on that bull of an Irishman—to take him down and teach him a thing or so.

444

The blue and rose gases and dust of the Wizard Nebula floated slowly past the triangular viewport of the briefing chamber inside the
Dark Star,
a Drakonian intergalactic warship. Stars that glistened like angel wings dotted the black, cosmic canvas as the vessel cruised through normal space, heading toward the constellation of Cepheus, and then onward into the vast expanse of the known universe.

Tikrow sat at the triangular table in the center of the sparsely furnished briefing room. The metal bulkheads were decorated with the stuffed and mounted heads of the enemies of the Drakonian Hegemony: humans, Omegans, Canisians, Rhajni, and even a Drakonian. But Tikrow wasn’t impressed or pleased by this display of Drakonian barbarism.

He was a proud Rhajni
shavgar
, which translated into Standard English as Warclaw, a high-ranking warlord. A powerful-looking lionman, he was a Pure Blood of the Grimalkin race on Rhajnara. His thick, brown mane was braided in warrior-fashion, and his sapphire eyes and sharp teeth were a striking display of superior breeding stock. His black and silver body armor gleamed under the overhead lights of the briefing room. He wore a black leather jacket over a silver breastplate, tight gray pants, and knee-high leather jackboots. The insignia emblazoned on the left side of his jacket was a black paw clutching a red dagger.

“Are you certain we’ll find him, Mister Snark?” he asked the small, well-dressed Drakonian sitting across from him.

The Drakonian’s forked tongue tasted the warm air. “Absolutely, Warclaw.”

Snark was a short, elderly humanoid who wore a gray business suit and horn-rimmed eyeglasses imported from Earth. Paradoxically, considering the assortment of heads mounted on the bulkhead walls, he wore the glasses because the very thought of eye transplants made him nauseous. He had a face that resembled an iguana’s, and large, scaly wattles that dangled from his throat. He was a special agent of the Drakonian Hegemony.

“My agents have scratched the stars from one end of the known universe to the other,” Snark continued, cleaning his sharp claws with a small knife. “We have reason to believe that he’s been a slave of the Zaturans for the past three years.”

“What of the one who betrayed us to the Felisians and then escaped our vengeance?” asked Kriff, a Rhajni
kajuro
, or captain, who sat next to Tikrow.

The Warclaw stared at Kriff for a moment, finding the necklace the captain wore a distasteful affectation quite unbecoming of an officer.

Kriff was in his mid-20s and had the looks of a white tiger. He, too, was a Grimalkin of Pure Blood. His uniform was similar to Tikrow’s, except that his shoulders were adorned with tiny crimson epaulets of Rhajni skulls, a sign of his rank and royal bloodline. The affectation he had chosen to adorn his uniform with was a necklace of human teeth and Omegan beaks. His holstered sidearm was a Drakonian zapgun, also known as a zapper.

“As far as former Minster Jhaza is concerned, let me assure you—my agents
will
find him, Captain Kriff,” Snark said.

“Has the outpost on Cindar been evacuated?” Tikrow asked the Drakonian.

Snark nodded. “Thanks to the information we extracted from the Terran spy. My agents will soon join up with the main outpost on Juvalar—what the humans called Grant’s Planet.”

“Do you have enough crystals?” Tikrow asked.

“More than enough to power the weapons we have stockpiled for you,” Snark replied.

“What of the spy?”

“I will be most happy to jettison him into space—alive,” Kriff offered.

“Then do so,” Tikrow told him. “The human’s stench turns my stomach.”

“As you command, Warclaw.”

Kriff rose from his seat, bowed to Tikrow and Snark, and then left the briefing room.

“Well, Mister Snark? What are your thoughts?” Tikrow asked.

“I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him,” the Drakonian replied. He finished cleaning his claws and tucked the knife away inside a suit pocket.

“Could he be the one?”

“I would not put it past him.”

Tikrow growled softly and shook his head. “Neither would I.”

444

The briefing room aboard the
Harper’s Ferry
was comfortable, if utilitarian in its furnishings. Swivel chairs sat around a circular table, with display monitors built into the tabletop for the benefit of those taking part in the briefings. Two-D maps of old Earth hung in silver frames from bulkhead walls paneled in real knotty pine, and a tall shelf made of oak held models of various sailing ships from Earth’s past. The room was well lit by fluorotubes built into the overhead. A rectangular portal showed the vast, utter blackness of hyperspace.

Cortez sat in his seat, hands firmly clasped on the mahogany tablet. Though he may have appeared calm and carefree, he was really as anxious as a cornered Antarian rat. He had never before experienced any anxiety prior to going out on a secret mission. But he had a feeling about this one, a foreshadowing of bigger things to come. Fear was a thing he refused to acknowledge, refused to accept, and he did his best to hide his apprehensiveness from the others. But he couldn’t stop his left leg from shaking and bouncing up and down beneath the table.

“Is something wrong, Sergeant Cortez?” Lieutenant Hooks asked.

“No, I am fine, Lieutenant,” Cortez told him. “I think it may have been the chow that is served in the galley.”

“I can believe that,” Hooks said with a knowing smile.

The lieutenant wasn’t fooled at all, Cortez realized.

Lieutenant Sam Hooks was in his late thirties, and had the looks of movie star from the classic era of Hollywood’s Golden Age of the early 20
th
century. Perfect teeth, a smile that could shame a supernova and a willingness to put his own life in harm’s way had won him the admiration, respect and loyalty of those under his command.

“Based on earlier intelligence, we already know that the Drakonians have been smuggling weapons to planets that are not on friendly terms with the Alliance,” he said. “Now we think they’re up to something new. Something big.”

“You think there is information being leaked to the Drakonians, sir?” Cortez asked.

“That is exactly what I think,” Hooks replied. “The evacuation of the Drakonian outpost on Cindar proves it. But the Hegemony denies any knowledge of its existence, claiming it must have been set up by renegades and outlaws.”

“That’s a cargo of blarney,” O’Hara said.

“I agree,” said Hooks. “Furthermore, I’ve just received a communiqué informing me that the Drakonian Embassy on Earth has been closed due to a virus unique to their species. The ambassador and his staff are on their way back to Drakona for special medical care. But that fish is five days old. Ain’t no way I’m buying it.”

“What about this cloaking system the Draks are working on?” Akira asked.

“That is a fact, Sergeant,” Hooks replied. “Though how much progress they’ve made in that direction has yet to be determined. Right now, that doesn’t concern me. What chafes my hide is that somehow the Draks were tipped off to your little raid on Cindar, and one of my agents has suddenly gone off the grid. I presume he is dead.”

“But our orders came straight from the top, sir,” O’Hara said.

“Exactly, Sergeant,” Hooks said. “General Ford and Admiral Curtiz, working with Admiral Ravetiel, the Omegan Fleet commander, set it all up. They conferred with Colonel Dakota, who passed the orders to Major Helm and Captain Branch, and then down to me.”

“The eternal chain of command,” Cortez said. So far, everything the lieutenant had told them added weight to the Spaniard’s misgivings.

“And that is the fly in the buttermilk, Sergeant,” Hooks said. “The problem is—there were just too many people involved in the planning of that raid, and too many communiqués that might have been intercepted. But this time, we’re taking no chances. The raid I’ve been authorized to plan is going to be strictly hush-hush.”

“Who’s in on it, sir?” asked Akira.

“The Devil Dogs of Company E,” Hooks replied.

O’Hara grinned. “So what’s the scoop?”

“Here it is,” Hooks said. “The four of us are the
only
ones who know where we’re heading. Two Comanche AEVs will take us in, but not even the pilots will know our destination until the last minute. The Devil Dogs won’t be told until they have a need to know.”

“You said
we
, sir?” Cortez asked. “You mean to say—”

“Exactly, Sergeant,” Hooks replied. “But I’ll be going on ahead, alone, though I’ll remain in constant contact with Captain Branch. I don’t want any snafus or muck-ups. This time I want to catch the Draks red-handed, take some prisoners and convince them to play nice with me.”

“Are we going to Grant’s Planet?” Cortez wanted to know.

“We are,” Hooks told him. “We’re going on holiday to Island 881.”

“I knew it!” O’Hara said. “I bloody well told you so!” He folded his hands across his chest and smirked with satisfaction.

In spite of the dread burrowing into the pit of his stomach, Cortez forced himself to smile.