Planetary Assault (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  Bjorn took a moment to glance back and saw the man in the blazer had two armed guardsmen in tow. The original plan had been to take a cab or a bus to town. That wasn’t going to work for him now.

  He reached the line of sun-silvered cars and ducked among them. Pounding feet followed. They weren’t shooting yet, but that was only a matter of time.

  Bjorn crouched behind a car until they were close. One second before they arrived, he sprang over the hood of the car. He attacked the guards before they could lift their rifles to their shoulders.

  The first man was dropped by a high kick to the face. Jaw broken, the man crumpled.

  The second soldier was more alert and had time to get off a single shot. The rifle cracked and Bjorn took the bullet in his right thigh. The guard had aimed low to disable him. That had been a mistake.

  Bjorn threw his bag at him and the guard didn’t even bother to duck. That was his second mistake. The bag had a large metal object in it, and it hit the guard with such force it knocked him down. A second later Bjorn was on him.

  “Always shoot to kill,” he told him before he put him to sleep with a blurring fist.

  The agent finally joined the fight. He stepped up behind Bjorn. He had his gun aimed at Bjorn’s head as Bjorn turned to face him.

  “Freeze right there, you son of a bitch,” the agent said. “I’ve got orders to bring you in alive, but I’ll forget them if you don’t cooperate.”

  Bjorn moved with careful slowness so as not to startle the man. He took a deep breath and straightened his clothing. He knew he didn’t have long. Soon, the entire base would go into shut-down mode and he’d be in it deep then.

  “You did well,” he told the agent calmly. “But not well enough. You should have shot me at range.”

  “Put your hands on your head,” the agent ordered. He began fumbling inside his jacket pocket nervously with one hand.

  Bjorn didn’t move. He gauged the distance between himself and the agent. It was only about ten feet.

  “I’m full of magic metal,” he told the agent. “I can kill you—even if you hit me with every round, you’ll still die. You have five seconds to decide what you’re going to do.”

  “Shut up,” snarled the other man. He finally pulled his shaking hands out of his blazer. He threw a pair of handcuffs on the tarmac at Bjorn’s feet. “Get on your knees and put those on.”

  The left side of Bjorn’s mouth flickered up into a brief half-smile. He shook his head slowly.

  “Three seconds left,” he said.

  “You’re crazy!” the agent shouted. “You can’t get away. There will be five hundred men hunting you down. This island isn’t—”

  “One second left—your last one. Have you made your decision, government man?”

  A long moment passed. The agent’s hands shook so much he could hardly hold his gun. He kept looking down at the fallen guardsmen with flickering eyes. Neither of them was moving. To him, they looked dead. Only Bjorn knew better. They’d both recover with prompt medical care.

  Finally, the agent lowered his weapon. Bjorn walked forward and plucked the gun out of the man’s nerveless fingers.

  “Right move,” Bjorn told him. “Now, tell this to General Kerr: Tell him not to keep fucking with me, or I will return the favor. I just want to be left alone. It’s all up to him.”

  He left the agent standing on the hot pavement, staring after him.

  -3-

  Bjorn’s leg was hurting and enough blood had run down into his shoes to make them squelchy. His nanites were already working hard on the spot, making it itch as much as it burned as they knitted his flesh back together as fast as they could. They’d already closed the skin and stopped the bleeding. In an hour or less, they would push the bullet out and the itching would fade.

  The gunplay actually served to make it easier to get off the base undetected. When traveling and even when on duty, most military personnel on American bases were unarmed. It was an absurd rule, but it was useful to Bjorn: it made them all run like hens when guns started blazing nearby.

  The parking lot was full of people scrambling to get into their cars and escape the area. Many were the family members of arriving airmen.

  Bjorn contrived to create a panicked look on his face. It didn’t come naturally to him, but he’d practiced the expression in front of mirrors. He requested a ride, saying he’d been hit. He was quickly picked up and whisked away by a young family of three. The woman in the car fussed, handing him tissues and baby wipes. The man drove with a worried eye in the rearview mirror, studying Bjorn. The baby itself, sitting in a car seat, stared at the stranger as if he were fascinating.

  Bjorn couldn’t help but smile at the kid. “You’ve got it made,” he told the child in a whisper. “Just don’t sign any papers when you grow up.”

  “You’re here because of the aliens, aren’t you?” the wife asked Bjorn suddenly.

  He looked at her. “I guess you could say that.”

  “Do you know anything? Are they coming here? What will they do?”

  “Monica, stop,” said her husband. “If he knows anything, he can’t tell us.”

  “They’re coming right here,” she said. She kept her eyes on Bjorn. “Star Force is only a hundred miles off. That will bring the war home to us. How could it not? I have a right to know if we’re all going to die.”

  Bjorn looked at her for a moment, then looked at the kid in the car seat. The baby hadn’t cried yet. He’d just stared at Bjorn with quiet intensity the entire time.

  “I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do,” he told the young mother. “I don’t think anybody does. But the military will do all that it can, I’m sure of that.”

  She turned away and crossed her arms. “That’s not good enough. We’re all dead or we’re all fine. There’s nothing we can do. I hate it.”

  The rest of the short trip to town was taken in silence. Even the kid stayed quiet.

  Bjorn let them drive him to the nearest hospital, where they began asking questions. He waved them off, thanked them, and headed through the emergency doors. He limped and held one hand to his knee, even though it was no longer bothering him much. The man’s wife wanted to follow, but her husband held her back.

  “He’ll be all right.”

  Bjorn smiled. Some men had the right instincts when they met him. They knew they should stay away. He wasn’t a large man, but he’d been told he had the face of a pit bull. There was something in his eyes that gave other men pause.

  After talking to the nurse, it was a simple matter to be placed in the waiting area. Anything less than a life-threatening injury never impressed emergency rooms. The system loved waiting rooms, and it loved to place you there and forget about you—preferably for hours.

  His leg was feeling much better. The nanites had formed a dark gray knot under the new layer of skin now. They’d sealed the wound and encapsulated the bullet with flesh and a fine coat of metal. Next, they would work and work, pressing the dark bullet out of his flesh. The injury had only earned him a disinterested glance from the admitting nurse, nothing more.

  Bjorn headed for the waiting room, but didn’t stop there. He kept right on walking through it and out the door. The nurses and patients barely noticed. They were all staring at the TVs stationed in every high corner. The TVs displayed the huge Macro Fleet sailing silently through the void toward Earth. They’d fired missiles which flew in a mass ahead of the fleet and Star Force was in full battle-mode, preparing to stop them. No one had time to look for a missing patient who’d probably just stepped out for a smoke.

  He was barely limping by the time he reached the parking lot. The nice couple that had given him a ride to the hospital had wisely disappeared. He followed their example and vanished into the city streets of downtown Key West.

  There wasn’t much traffic of any kind. The tourist shops were empty and many of them were closed. Everyone was watching the skies nervously.

  * * *

  F
or Bjorn, renting a boat turned out to be harder than flying down here on a military transport had been. The trouble was no one on the docks really wanted to rent anything to him. They had either closed up shop, or were saving their boats for their families in case they had to run. Everyone in Key West knew that Star Force was based nearby on Andros Island, and that was only about a hundred and fifty miles away. Far too close for comfort.

  If history were to be repeated, the machines would take an interest in that Island. They might bomb it, or land on it—who knew? People talked about radiation and tidal waves. The tourist traffic had dried up to a trickle already, and the locals had hung “gone fishing” signs in half the windows in town.

  This last detail helped Bjorn narrow down his search. He walked the docks, found a suitable boat and crept aboard, lying on the deck under some tarps. He waited until nightfall, dozing.

  When midnight came and went, the sole watchman was riveted to the tiny TV in his booth. Bjorn came up to the window, intending to knock the man unconscious. Instead, he frowned and found himself watching the report over the man’s shoulder.

  The Macros were almost here, and the barrage of missiles they’d fired at Earth was getting close. This was a definite sign they hadn’t come to sign a free-trade deal.

  No one said where the missiles were heading, but Bjorn had a pretty good idea. He turned and looked due east, there Andros lay. What the hell was that madman Riggs doing out there now?

  He left the guardsman in the booth, without the heart to injure him. Quietly, he stole the crappy, peeled-paint scow he’d been hiding aboard and floated gently away. He kept the running lights off and slipped away into the night. The watchman, if he’d heard anything, never stirred from his television. Bjorn couldn’t blame him for that. It looked like the world was ending, and ground zero was going to be right about here.

  It was enough to make him wish he’d chosen a different destination, but his plan was still clear in his head: he wanted to get into the middle of the confusion and vanish. Already, that strategy had paid off dividends. If he’d stayed up in D. C. or gone to one of his usual hiding spots on the globe using traditional transportation, he probably would have been captured or killed by now. As it was, they’d managed to put a bullet into his leg. He hoped the distractions of the coming war would be enough to hide him without killing him outright.

  During the day, Bjorn had collected a fair amount of supplies. It was easy to do—no one was guarding anything. Half the population had fled the Keys and the other half were huddling in their homes. The Macros were more frightening than any hurricane that had ever threatened these shores.

  There were nearly two thousand islands down here, not even counting the ones farther out around Andros, which was technically part of the Bahamas. Many of them were very small and most were uninhabited. There were only about eighty thousand year-round residents in any case. With so much of the population having fled the region, Bjorn estimated there were only about ten people left per island, tops.

  That was what had made the Keys his destination. He’d always liked tropical beaches, who didn’t? He’d come down here to escape his problems in a very real way. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t running to avoid the robots from space—he wanted to avoid the governments of Earth. Most especially, he wanted to avoid General Kerr and his minions.

  When a man had little money and few resources, a deserted tropical island was as good a place as any to seek refuge and, more importantly, solitude. The stolen boat was small, slow and decrepit. But it was seaworthy, had a low profile and was propelled by a quiet, burbling engine. For Bjorn’s purposes, it was the perfect getaway vehicle.

  Star Force had claimed all of the big slices of land out to the east, but off the shores of the main Keys were many smaller ones. He located several, scouted them, but rejected them all. There was one thing he needed above all else: a good supply of fresh water.

  On the fourth island, he found what he was looking for. Three huts that had been there for the better part of a century. They were primitive, and open to the elements. There were hammocks, a dock and little else. Most importantly, there was a drum half-full of water, and a catch-basin system to run more rainwater into the drum.

  Bjorn tapped at it, listening to the echo approvingly. There had to be a hundred gallons, maybe more. He unloaded the boat and set up camp. Within hours, he had a fire going in a pit so the light couldn’t be seen from the mainland. He toasted up his dinner, which consisted of cheese, sausage and some fresh vegetables. He knew he’d have to forage soon, but for now, he was going to eat well.

  The small island was interesting to him. He wondered about its history. The buildings were colorful and had probably housed generations of poor people years ago. Squatters had lived in places like this in the old days. But now, rich people bought these islands and came to anchor their houseboats at the docks.

  One would think people with a million or two to blow on a small island would build a mansion on it, but that was no longer possible. There were so many environmental laws and building codes that it was almost impossible to build new structures on an island down here. They could only patch up what had been built in the past.

  And so, his tiny island served him well as a hiding place and as a museum from simpler times. The peacefulness of the spot belied the nervousness of the people on the main island.

  Bjorn tried to forget about them and the coming aliens—surprisingly, he managed it. The island was peaceful and almost magical in that regard. It was as if the cares of the world could all be forgotten here.

  He enjoyed his newfound peace for a short time, and every hour was precious to him.

  -4-

  The next day on the island was peaceful and sublime. Bjorn hadn’t experienced anything like this in a long, long time. As he gazed out to sea, watching the birds spiral and the waves slap against the foliage-covered shores, he wondered why he hadn’t done this in the past.

  He quickly came up with ways to keep a low profile. He waited until the sun set out over the Gulf of Mexico to begin cooking in a fire pit. The deep pit hid the light of the flames and the darkness hid the smoke. He’d caught fish during the day with his lightning-fast hands, and when they were cooked to crispy perfection he ate them ravenously. He added fruit to his diet which he’d gathered while swimming to neighboring islands to scout them and make sure they were uninhabited. To supplement the meal, he added a single can of pinto beans from the stash of canned goods he’d found on the boat.

  About an hour after the sun had set over the Gulf of Mexico, Bjorn noticed odd flashes of light in the opposite direction, to the east. The Florida Keys marked the boundary between the Gulf and the Atlantic. Gazing eastward, he knew he must be seeing activity over the home of Star Force, as Andros Island was due east of his position.

  Although he’d long made it a point not to concern himself with political events, even he was interested in a battle with aliens occurring so close he could see it with his own eyes.

  He watched until things seemed to quiet, and then went back to the business of keeping his location a secret. Just after midnight, the moon dipped under the horizon. He took this occasion to ditch the boat he’d used to get here. The bigger islands were less than a quarter mile away, and there were other dark islets closer than that. He didn’t really need the boat any longer. Like all nanotized people, he was an excellent swimmer.

  He didn’t want to leave the boat docked at the island because it was stolen and it was a clear sign to anyone passing near that the island was inhabited. He had to get rid of it, but scuttling the boat wasn’t a realistic option. The waters here were shallow and he wanted the evidence far away from him. If he sank the thing just offshore, he knew passersby might well notice the wreck twenty feet down on the sandy bottom.

  Instead, he cut her loose when the night was at its darkest and let her drift out to sea. There was a northerly current in the area, and it took the craft away slowly. He watched it fade to the northeast un
til it was indistinguishable from the black ocean and the slate-gray sky.

  It was then that he took the occasion to look upward. He frowned, uncertain as to what he was seeing.

  Blue streaks of glowing light were up there—dozens of them. They had an elongated look, like jets of blue gas. They were moving—moving fast.

  “What the hell…?” he asked the parrots and the waves. The birds had fallen silent, as had the insects.

  His bafflement slid away and became something more personal: fear. He knew what he had to be seeing…the machines had arrived at last.

  More blue trails flared into existence out to the west, streaking downward with alarming speed. He realized they must be coming down below the cloud layer, flying into the atmosphere from orbit and slowing as they entered the thickest layers of Earth’s sky. There had to be fifty—no, more kept appearing. There were hundreds of them! He knew the Macros had huge ships, bigger than anything Earth had. Could they really have so many? Could they be flying them directly at Andros Island, the base of Star Force, with such reckless speed? Earth’s ships seemed pathetic in comparison. A motley collection of stolen vessels and homebrewed ships with half-baked designs. He’d seen them online. The biggest of them was no more than a tenth the size of the enemy cruisers. If he was seeing hundreds of enemy ships streaking toward Earth, everything was surely lost.

  Bjorn’s eyes searched the sky, looking for anything else of interest. Where were the Star Force ships? Where were Earth’s fleets, as tiny as they might be? Try as he might, he couldn’t see another fleet.

  Then a shocking series of events followed. Near at hand, less than a mile from his position, a blossoming white light lit up the night. He crouched and stared out to the open sea. There, illuminated briefly by the missile it had just fired, was what had to be a submarine. He hadn’t seen it out there at all until it had launched a missile.