The Soldier: Final Odyssey

by Vaughn Heppner

  Halifax turned knobs and began filling the final plastic object so it swelled. He inserted himself into it, closing the way. The tanks continued to fill it with air until he was in a giant bubble. Anything would pierce the bubble’s skin, but until then it would allow him to remove the helmet and suit and relieve himself without doing it in his suit.

  The bubble with Dr. Halifax continued to move away from the lurker-shuttle combination.

  Who would win the confrontation? Maybe Cade had already won. Maybe Cade was in the process of losing.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Somewhat earlier in time, in his battlesuit, Cade climbed aboard the lurker. He paused a moment. This wasn’t necessarily the lurker, but could be a companion vessel. No. That wasn’t reasonable. The lurker acted stealthily. Thus, this must be a stealthy attack and vessel. The Master wouldn’t want anyone in the system to see what happened.

  There were no cyborgs or androids in the chamber, but he spied wisps of smoke from the previous explosion and shrapnel from his grenades embedded in the bulkheads.

  He was aboard the enemy vessel. If it was the lurker—

  I need to find the control chamber. I need to kill everyone aboard. I must attack fast in order to forestall any cyborg from self-detonating the ship.

  That was a tall order.

  “Might as well keep going,” Cade said.

  He did, clanking through ship-passages and corridors and entering chambers. He did not see anything other than ship equipment. The vessel struck him as huge. He rode a lift onto a new level and repeated the performance. This couldn’t be an automated ship. Where were the cyborgs then? Had he slain all the androids?

  The tight-fitting battlesuit made him feel claustrophobic, but he shoved that deep inside, ignoring it. He rode the elevator again onto the next level. The elevator hatch opened—

  Two cyborgs stood waiting, firing stubby shotgun-like weapons. Black capsules flew at Cade, hit and exploded sticky strands over his battlesuit.

  Tanglers, they’re using tanglers.

  With the rev of his servos, Cade broke the tightening sticky strands meant to web him. He leveled the autocannons and blasted shells even as they fired another round of tangle capsules.

  The cyborgs were hideous-looking creatures. They were long and lean like starvation victims, something out of a horror movie. Part of them was machine: power-graphite bones, fiber-sheathed nerves and other systems married to bio-matter like cloth. The heads looked like skulls with armored brainpans, and their outer skin was steel-plated in places. They wore blue fabric suits, and moved with insectile speed.

  Dropping the tanglers as they dodged Cade’s shells, the two cyborgs pulled up machine pistols, firing so bullets hammered against his battlesuit.

  Had they forgotten how to deal with battlesuits?

  Cade clanked out of the lift as they poured machine-pistol bullets against him. One of cyborgs tossed his weapon aside, reached back and pulled up a grenade launcher. He began hammering grenades against the battlesuit. The two of them kept sprinting backward, keeping out of the battlesuit’s grasp.

  Cade roared inside the helmet, with spit bouncing off the inner surface to hit his face. He didn’t notice as he switched to machine-gun fire and sprayed heavy shells. The things were damn fast, but they couldn’t dodge a stream of shells at close quarters. He blew them apart, smashed bulkheads, too, along with some of the chambers behind the torn ship walls.

  “Yes!” Cade roared, the sounds reverberating in his tight-fitting helmet.

  Elation filled him, and he began hunting for more cyborgs to kill.

  No, no, he told himself. You must gain control of your emotions. Mayhem for its own sake won’t win you your wife.

  He noticed that someone was speaking and looked right and left but couldn’t see anyone. Finally, he halted and turned on his outer receivers.

  He heard a cyborg through wall-speakers and turned on his outer microphone.

  “Who is this?” Cade said.

  “I am the Master. Did you hear what I said earlier?”

  “No.”

  “Cease your senseless attack at once or I will detonate the vessel.”

  “What do I care?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Marcus Cade, you piece of filth.”

  “Ah. I thought so. You must surrender to me, Marcus Cade.”

  “I don’t think so. In fact, I have a better idea. You surrender to me. Better yet, jettison yourself. That will save us all much trouble.”

  “I will not let you reach the control chamber.”

  “Then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?”

  “Do you desire death?”

  “Do you?”

  “I am the Master.”

  “Sure, you are,” Cade said, as he continued to march through the vessel.

  The Master spoke more, but Cade ignored him now. He reached another elevator.

  “If you enter it, we both die,” the Master said.

  Cade frowned, finally understanding that his death meant he would never free Raina. He would never see his beloved Valkyrie again. That was so unbelievably tragic, that the thought broke through his battle madness. What should he do? Surrender was out of the question. Could he pull a Halifax on the Master? He had nothing to lose at this point, so he might as well try.

  “I can’t leave your vessel or you’ll destroy me,” Cade said.

  “That is true. Thus, you must surrender. You have a greater destiny, as the Web-Mind desires your knowledge.”

  “If you know who and what I am, you know I won’t surrender to you.”

  “I know,” the Master said. “But you should know this: your companion will die with you if you continue hunting for me. Soon, there will be no lurker, as I have begun the auto-destruct sequence. The Web-Mind gave firm orders regarding the ship. I am not allowed to let the vessel fall into anyone’s hands.”

  Cade believed the Master, and by believing… He spun around, and he began to run in his battlesuit back the way he had come.

  “Where are you going?” the Master asked. When no answer was forthcoming, he said, “Oh, to the lifeboats, I presume. No. It is too late for that. You will not reach them in time.”

  Realizing the Master spoke the truth, a red haze filled Cade’s thinking. The idea of losing Raina, of failing in his mission—

  “Die!” the soldier shouted, lobbing grenades and using a missile, firing it down a long corridor. The accompanying explosions shook the vessel.

  “We will both die, Marcus Cade. This is the end for us.”

  At that point, a terrific explosion shook the lurker. Pieces of bulkhead loosened and flew at the battlesuit. They broke it down, and knocked Cade out. He had no idea what happened next.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Cade dreamed. That must have meant he yet lived. The dreams…they were of times past during the War over a thousand years ago.

  He dreamed of the slog through the eternal city of Trantor. Battle Unit 175 fought cyborgs in the Asimov District. It was one sick ambush after another. Swarming cyborgs boiled up out of the sewer system or jumped down from buildings. They had little concept of dying and no fear of death. The cyborgs attacked, and the Ultra soldiers of Battle Unit 175 killed and were killed.

  An atomic blast took out Cade’s unit in the Asimov District, along with him, although he survived and spent weeks in regrow tanks.

  Later, he was part of a team that moved across a bleak moon. The Ultra soldiers made long, low bounds in their battlesuits, using sensor-guided autocannons to take down hundreds of drones that dove down to attack. Soon enough, they found the surface breach and entered the tunnels under the moon’s surface. Three weeks of desperate subterranean battles ended with Cade losing an arm and a leg, both on the same side of his body. That meant going back to the regrow tanks.

  He’d taken countless wounds during the War. He’d spent months in regrows. It had never been fun. It had often hurt, but he’d been reborn each time as a new soldie
r to fight the hated enemy again and again, and yet again.

  The War had been a great and tedious slog of battles. Each taken alone had been an epic of valor and heroism and dirt, sweat and stomach-twisting fear. Yes, Ultras felt fear, because despite their physical prowess, they were all too human.

  The cyborgs had passed beyond their humanity, becoming horror-creatures. It must have been nice not worrying about dismemberment or death.

  Cade dreamed, and it seemed as if he tumbled end-over-end in space. There was debris all around him. What did it mean?

  Likely, maybe even obviously, it meant he’d survived the lurker’s auto-destruction. The battlesuit had proven tougher than expected, and it ended up helping him that it was such a tight fit. He hadn’t rattled around inside his suit at the blasts that had destroyed the lurker and shuttle. He’d taken heavy bruising, but no broken bones. And the emergency needles injecting him with hibernation drugs meant he barely breathed. That in turn meant the air in his tanks was lasting for many days on end.

  Cyborg parts drifted in the lurker debris. The shuttle had exploded, too. Blood, human body parts and pieces were also part of the mass of debris. That did not include Dr. Halifax. It was possible he was farther away in a bubble, enduring panic and loneliness. It was funny, but with his gravely slowed metabolism, Cade might last longer than Halifax in his giant bubble of air.

  Despite that, Cade was all alone in the night, and he might have expired in another few days, a memory of a time past.

  But the station head of Saint Louis Planet had lied in one particular to both Cade and Halifax. Leona Quillian had not left, but had remained in the background as Cade and Halifax performed their chosen mission.

  Quillian was now part of the G6 team on the consortium warship G. T. Beauregard. It was the same vessel that had given the shuttle such a hard time before.

  The G. T. Beauregard was bigger than a Patrol cruiser and oval shaped. It had heavier lasers and no missiles. This was a close-in fighting vessel, meant to mix it up with the enemy at close range. That meant it had powerful gravity dampeners and huge engines for maximum acceleration and deceleration.

  Quillian was in the captain’s ready room. He was a tall, sparse man with spiked hair and green compelling eyes. He wore a black uniform and sipped his tea. He called himself “the General” and demanded that others on his ship do so as well.

  The General was the brother to the president of the consortium, and he had aspirations to command a fleet someday.

  “You were correct,” the General was saying as he set his teacup upon its saucer.

  Leona Quillian wore her black cleaner’s garments. She did not have any visible weapons, as the General’s bodyguards had searched her to make sure. They had failed to find her poison-coated fingernails, however. And, if she crushed a false tooth, she could also spew cluthe upon the General. It would kill him without a trace of her having done it.

  It was something of a miracle she was here at the same time as Cade, although she had been using many G6 contacts to track his route through the Concord and she also had a highly advanced predictive computer that had made some shrewd guesses concerning his plans.

  From behind his large desk, the General eyed her. He’d just finished reading a computer slate. “There appear to be two survivors. One is in a plastic air-bubble and wearing a spacesuit. He is separate from the debris, although not that far from it. The second is a man in a battlesuit who is definitely drifting among the ship debris.”

  “He’s the one I’m after,” Quillian said.

  The General regarded her. “I’m…not sure I can give him to you.”

  Quillian nodded. “You must do as you see fit, sir. However, Director Titus will reward you if you hand him over to me. In fact, I could use both of them.”

  “You greatly desire the second man?”

  “I do indeed,” Quillian said. She was never going to trick Cade out of the General. Maybe she could use the truth. “He’s an ancient Ultra and part of a greater Earth experiment. I realize the lurker is gone, destroyed, but surely there is much you can learn by gathering all the debris and studying it, possibly reconstructing certain lurker components.”

  “Are you trying to convince me to take the lurker junk and be happy with it?”

  “I am,” Quillian said.

  The General let his eyes rove over her slender form. “Perhaps…I will let you convince me if you are persuasive enough.”

  The man was a pig and obviously wanted her sexually. She could agree and kill him during the act. That might mean an interrogation by the General’s brother, the consortium president. No. She couldn’t just kill the General. She would have to please the pig and take Cade back to Earth. Then, she would pass through the 16 Cygni System again on her way back home, and she would then give the General more than he desired.

  Thus, Quillian smiled, picking up her teacup, sipping and batting her eyelashes at the man. “You can have me, or you can have money or influence. Which will bring you closer to your dream?”

  “Perhaps I want all three.”

  “Perhaps the price will be too high for what I desire.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. All three. I shall have all three.”

  “Yes,” Quillian said, smiling, as she rose, and ran her hands down her hips. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  Because when I come back this way, you pig, I’m going to make you wish you’d never been born.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  In his plastic-coated air-bubble, Dr. Halifax endured and told himself he wasn’t going to die.

  Oh, he’d seen the explosion. That had been a terrifying moment. He’d expected a tiny piece of debris to fly through his air bubble and pierce his spacesuit.

  That hadn’t happened. Otherwise, he’d be dead.

  He’d begun to check himself for signs of radiation poisoning. Despite a few panicked times where he was sure he’d shown signs, in the end, he was healthy and felt fine, in a relative sense.

  Thus, he waited in the bubble. Twice, he’d forced himself to shed the suit and use the weightless toilet to relieve himself. It had been daunting sitting on the can, as it were, without a suit. Any rent would end his life. At first, he hadn’t been able to go. He’d had to close his eyes—

  Enough said. He’d used the facilities and climbed back into the spacesuit. After the second time, it proved harder to don the suit. It stank, and that would only get worse with time.

  Still, he was alive out here. Surely, someone would come to investigate the explosion. He sure as hell hoped they did. Otherwise—

  No, no, don’t even think about suffocating to death. Don’t think about dying by inches while you scream for help. Don’t think—you idiot, you’re thinking about it when you’re not supposed to.

  He’d had a panic attack and only later realized it had cost him plenty of fluids. It was a wonder he hadn’t torn his little air bubble with his failing about.

  Tedious days went by. He would check his chronometer, thinking—hoping—another day had passed, and it would only be a few hours.

  He began playing mental games. He started reviewing his life. Maybe being a sly rascal hadn’t been the best way to proceed with living. Was there anything after this life? He pondered that, remembered when Cade had prayed and wondered if there really was a supernatural entity that had created all this. He’d been agnostic most of his life. Evolution and chance had spawned the universe. How that evolution had come about—well, evolution didn’t answer some critical questions. Like, how did it all get here in the first place? In the beginning was there nothing and then there had been something? That was logically impossible. Nothing ever came from nothing. For a thing to exist there had to be a cause. In other words, there had to be something. If aliens had started the whole shebang on Earth and around the Orion Arm, who’d started the damned aliens?

  It was very frustrating and more than a little frightening to think about these things while drifting in an air bubble
in deep space all alone. He didn’t want to believe in a creator, certainly not in a big C Creator that would ask him questions after he died. That implied—

  “Enough,” Halifax said aloud. It was time to think about other things. He daydreamed about women he’d known or seen, about peeling off their clothes and having his way with them. That was much more delightful than thinking about God.

  “Why did you make me to love women so much?” Halifax shouted.

  He scowled afterward. How could he shout at God, how could he rage at God, if he knew that God didn’t exist? Who had ever made up the notion of God in the first place? Why did so many people believe in God? Was it weakness of personality in them, or was it a natural thing to believe in a higher power?

  Fortunately, for Halifax’s peace of mind, he saw thrusters in the distance, what had to be a plume out there. That meant a spaceship, people and rescue.

  He pushed thoughts of God, afterlife and judgment far away. He hated the entire construct and wished he never had indulged in it.

  A spaceship was coming, and it was braking, right?

  Halifax shouted and waved his arms until he started breathing heavy. That was only going to use up his air and water faster. It might be some time before the sensor operators saw him.

  They had to see him. If they didn’t see him—panic set in and he started hyperventilating.

  “God help me,” he whispered, and then he scowled, angry with himself. “What am I doing? No. If they see me, they see me. If they don’t, praying to a non-being isn’t going to help me in the slightest.”

  He didn’t break that down, either. He set himself to watching the plume grow. Oh, that had to be the loveliest sight in the universe. A spaceship was braking.

  It took so long, but finally the plume began to shrink, shrink even more until he strained to see it. At that point, a ship began to show in the blackness of space.

  Halifax laughed, giggled and kissed the inside of his bubble helmet.

  I’m a genius. This was a brilliant idea. I outfoxed everyone, including the musclebound clod Cade.