Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike

by Vaughn Heppner

  “You have our word,” the android said. “Claath will be most pleased.”

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t shoot. I’m coming in.”

  I edged toward the T-shaped corner and hurled the jacket. I saw a flash of silver buttons just before the jacket disappeared into the other corridor. Almost immediately, the flamer whirred with sound and made a belching noise. The superheated plasma boiled through the corridor, no doubt burning the jacket in a second.

  I’d already backed up. The expanded plasma passed me. I felt the wash of heat through my suit and helmet. Luckily, I’d already shut the visor, or I might have sucked down superheated air.

  As soon as the ball of plasma passed, I pulled myself around the corner and fired, aiming at the tripod-mounted flamer. It would take the mechanism at least another thirty seconds to recharge for a second shot.

  “I see him,” an android said.

  “Fire!” the leader told him.

  My suit absorbed their laser fire for less than three seconds. At the end of that time, my beam broke into the flamer’s armored core. The heavy weapon exploded with the building plasma charge.

  I ducked behind my corner.

  An orange glow like a new sun told me the plasma expanded. It made sizzling noises, meaning it ate corridor steel and androids.

  Portable plasma cannons were like old-time flamethrowers from WWII. Both were nasty, terrifying weapons. They each devoured enemy soldiers. The problem with both weapons was their vulnerability to enemy fire. If a bullet hit a flamethrower’s tank back in the day, it could end in a fiery death for everyone nearby. The same thing had happened here to the sleepers.

  Finally, the glow died down like a setting sun.

  “Be careful as you pass the area,” I told the others. “Everything is hot and could burn you if you touch it.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Rollo said.

  We passed the melted androids and the metallic sopping walls. I saw beads of molten metal dripping like tears. One of the troopers shouted in pain then as a floating piece of red-hot plasma sizzled against his calf muscle.

  Another turn in the corridor brought us to the front of the armory. I opened the vault and in a matter of minutes, I had five suited troopers, not just one.

  “What’s next?” Rollo asked, as he sealed a helmet over his head.

  I’d been mulling that over; the answer depended on several factors. How many androids were on our ship and where did they attack? And where were the rest of my people?

  “N7, can you hear me?” I said through my helmet’s comm-unit.

  I got high-speed chatter for an answer, and that told me all I needed to know. The enemy still blocked our communications.

  “We stick together,” I told the others. “We’re a hunter-killer team.”

  “Which way do we go?” Rollo asked.

  What would I do if I were a Starkien contractor? If I could wake sleeper units on an enemy vessel, I’d go for life support first and the engine second, disabling it. But in order to do their task…yeah, they had to keep the troopers away from their suits. The best way to do that would be to kill them.

  “We’re heading for our main quarters,” I said. I meant where the majority of the troopers slept and practiced.

  On the way there, we slew three more androids. Then we hit another concentration of them, and it devolved into a firefight.

  These androids had more mass and strength than we did and they had tougher skin than the training models used on us a year ago. Even so, the androids couldn’t compete against a suited trooper. That was only logical. Otherwise, Claath would have built androids and used them for his soldiers for hire. He had come to Earth for a reason. One of them clearly was that humans made excellent ground pounders, individual soldiers with a Bahnkouv and grenade.

  We proved that during the next few minutes.

  “Lucy is hit,” Rollo said, meaning the trooper who had burned her calf earlier. Her left shoulder smoked from concentrated enemy laser fire.

  “Get behind us,” I told her.

  She didn’t want to do that, as Lucy was in the grip of battle fury. But she obeyed because she belonged to the toughest, best-trained outfit in the galaxy: the last of us out of many thousands. There had been something like twenty-three thousand human troopers in the beginning. One hundred and sixty-eight had made it back to Earth: the lucky, the mean, the tough and the royal bastards that nothing but atomic weaponry could take down.

  “I’m done playing around,” I said, a minute later and after a particularly nasty laser exchange with the androids. The bright beams had put little purple splotches in my vision. “Cover me.” I wanted to take out these androids now.

  “Creed, wait,” Rollo said.

  No. We didn’t have any more time to wait. Starkien beamships were near Neptune. How much time did that give us here on Earth? Several days, hours, I don’t know. What I did know was that we had to kill these androids yesterday.

  I clicked a grenade onto the highest setting and hurled it at the final clump of androids in the game room. We’d managed to drive them into there. They hid behind metal boxes, gaming equipment and lifting machines.

  Two androids leaned out, beaming the grenade as it sailed at them. Thank you, you piles of automated crap. I shot one through the neck, a direct hit with a heavy laser. The other one darted behind the gym equipment.

  A third took a shot at me as I sailed into the room. The laser smoked against my symbiotic armor. Then I was down behind a metal box. My armor squirmed, and it secreted an oozing black substance that acted like a scab. Given time, the suit would heal. I slithered along the floor, and tossed another grenade. None of the androids saw it, and the capsule sailed past the gym equipment before going nova. That meant I took damage, but not as much as the closer enemies did.

  “At your two o’clock,” Rollo said.

  My turn came to beam a grenade, which I did from my back while shooting from the hip. An android decided for a fancy play, slithering out to meet me. He died. I leaped up toward the ceiling and caught another one trying the same thing on the floor. I beamed him in the back.

  Then Rollo charged into the room, followed by Hanks.

  We took out the rest of the stubborn constructs, and we burned the carcasses for good measure.

  That freed ten troopers holed up in the other room. They’d had several laser pistols, and had held off the androids just long enough for us to get here.

  “Escort them to the armory,” I told Rollo. “Once they’re suited, head for life support. My guess is more androids are on their way there.”

  “How many of those things are loose on our battlejumper?” Rollo asked.

  “Too many,” I said.

  “Claath should have used them when we first stormed aboard in Sigma Draconis and grabbed the battlejumper,” Rollo said. “He might have stopped us that way.”

  “He was too busy at the time.” I meant with Jennifer. A cold feeling knotted my gut. Jennifer was on the battlejumper somewhere.

  Jen was my girl, an Earth orphan, her parents picked up during WWII during a Jelk observation run. She’d grown up as a tame human on an alien world. Trained as a nurse, she had come back to help process millions of men and women through neuro-fiber surgery. The Lokhar nukes and bio-terminator meant she’d only helped with a few thousand surgeries. In any case, she’d held Claath at gunpoint after we’d teleported onto the battlejumper at Sigma Draconis.

  Maybe that’s why the androids had remained hidden until now. Claath hadn’t been able to release them against us. In a way, I wish he had done so back then. We could have killed them all then, as long as they wouldn’t have tipped the scales against us twenty-one days ago.

  “Go,” I told Rollo.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Hanks, you’re coming with me. We need everyone suited and armed,” I told Rollo. “Now no more jawing. We all have work to do.”

  Rollo saluted, a lazy, two-fingered thing, a
nd left with the others. Hanks and I traveled in a different direction.

  During the next twenty minutes, the two of us freed fifty more troopers, killing eight androids in the process. The alien chatter had grown less on the helmet channel. It told me the number of androids had become considerably fewer.

  “What’s happening in space, N7?” I asked. “Give me a status report.”

  Our android was in the control room.

  “There’s something else coming out of the Neptune jump point,” he said from the bridge.

  I checked my HUD map. I saw five suited trooper teams now, moving through the vessel. We’d lost ten people so far, most of those techs picked off the various freighters.

  “Can you fire our battlejumper laser at the Starkien warships?” I asked N7.

  “Fire the laser all the way to Neptune?” he asked.

  I recalled the Sigma Draconis battle. The Jelk battlejumpers and Starkien beamships had taken on a Lokhar guardian fleet. During the battle, I’d seen how Jelk heavy lasers had outranged the Lokhar primary beams. I figured we had that same advantage here against the Starkien vessels. The only problem was that we had a single working beam and they had brought five of their warships…well, at least five.

  I wanted to be in the control room with N7. It surprised me the androids hadn’t already hit the place. Yeah, I saw N7’s point about range. Neptune was an insane distance. I didn’t know about any alien weapons system other than missiles that could reach so far. Clearly, our laser couldn’t.

  “I’m heading for you,” I told N7.

  “I’ve managed to finally bring up the interior battlejumper schematic,” he told me.

  “I thought that was being jammed.”

  “It was,” N7 said. “I rerouted and now I have a full interior map.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I’m transmitting to you,” N7 said.

  My helmet uploaded through the link and I studied the situation on my HUD. According to this, five android teams remained. We’d gotten half of them, and there were more suited troopers every minute.

  Okay. Good. The enemy had played a surprise. They had bought themselves some time with it, but that was all. They hadn’t murdered very many of us and so far, they hadn’t been able to dismantle the battlejumper. On our side, we’d eliminated half the androids and gained full control of the battlejumper—or would very soon.

  I better recalled ship laser distances from what I’d seen during the Sigma Draconis Battle. We should be able to target and hit Starkien beamships something on the order of ten million kilometers away. The Starkiens had much smaller vessels. Their beams could only reach a million or so kilometers. That was still far, but not against a Jelk heavy laser.

  We could win this fight…provided our primary laser didn’t burn out and provided we got all the sleepers aboard our ship.

  I should have realized there was a third enemy option. Yeah, I should have realized it even as I hurried to the control room.

  -4-

  I floated onto the bridge. There were various stations built on a main dais in the center of the chamber. They were like a Stonehenge ring, although on a smaller scale. The lower floor circled the dais. One part of the wall down there held a giant screen, the main one. Presently, troopers manned the stations, along with one of the new engineers and N7.

  He was an android, an N-series, heavy-G mining type with advanced upgrades and a bio-brain. N7 had thrown in his lot with us during the storming of the Lokhar Planetary Defense Station. The android had proven invaluable to our gaining freedom and he had become my friend.

  N7 was strong, although not steel-wall punching powerful, looked like a blond-haired choirboy and knew far more about Jelk technology than any of us did. He was the reason why our engineers and techs had learned anything useful.

  As I entered, I saw Earth below on half the main screen. Morning dawned in the Sahara Desert in North Africa. The other side of the split-screen showed Neptune, 4.5 billion kilometers away, and the five blue dots indicating the Starkien beamships. The actual jump point was a small yellow dot near the gas giant. As I entered, another blue dot exited the jump point. Clearly, the Starkiens still had more warships coming.

  I wasn’t as interested in the baboons at the moment. There were three red dots on Earth, showing where the last freighters rested. The other barges had already climbed into orbit.

  “I see you’ve spotted the enemy flotilla,” I said. “But I doubt any radio signal came from them to us to wake up the sleepers.”

  “Agreed,” N7 said.

  “You do?”

  “Logic dictates there should be a source point somewhat closer.”

  “Have you been scanning for that source point?” I asked.

  “Indeed,” N7 said. “I sent Bey and Hodges onto the other side of Earth, patching through their instrumentation to us. So far, I have not detected any anomalies.”

  Bey and Hodges each commanded a space freighter. Originally, Claath had left the people in each vessel to their own devices. They hadn’t been able to lift off then. It had made the places prison houses, with the toughest and most cunning climbing to the top. Few of the freighters had practiced democracy, but the law of tooth and claw instead. Murad Bey was a Turk and Rex Hodges had once been a tackle for the Dallas Cowboys. I had left them in control of each of their ships for now, since we didn’t have time for anything else.

  “What about the Moon?” I asked N7. “Is anything suspicious going on there?”

  “There are no anomalies near Luna,” N7 said, “although someone could be hiding on the dark side.”

  “What do you believe about the androids? Did they gain entrance from space or were they sleepers aboard ship?”

  “Probabilities and logic indicate the stealth teams originated on the battlejumper,” N7 said.

  “Obviously then, somebody woke them to coincide with the appearance of the Starkien flotilla.”

  “I congratulate you,” N7 said. “That is the most logical conclusion.”

  “Then you believe like me that someone is out there closer to us than Neptune?” I said.

  “I have already indicated as much.”

  Making a fist, I tapped it against my chin. A Starkien flotilla, android stealth teams…what else had Claath thrown against us? This all must have originated with him. No one else among the Jelk would care enough. Still, the last time I’d seen Claath, he’d turned into a ball of energy, burning through bulkheads and floating away into space. He’d done that to escape me—I’d tied him to chair and tortured him for answers. He’d still been humanoid, flesh and blood then. Could he operate like a ball of energy, communicating with regular people? Or had Claath been forced to turn back into a flesh and blood creature? It seemed like a crazy question, but there was too much about interstellar space that had turned out to be just plain weird.

  “How far out could a signal have originated to reach the sleepers?” I asked.

  “Far?” N7 asked.

  “Reasonably,” I said, “taking into consideration that this was a military operation.”

  “That would depend on the sophistication of the message.”

  “We—”

  “A moment, please,” N7 said. He tapped his board, checking it, and said, “I have detected an anomaly in Mars orbit.”

  “Put it on the screen,” I said.

  He complied, saying, “I am amplifying the image and giving the anomaly a blue color.”

  Earth and Neptune disappeared from the split-screen. Now Mars appeared, and like a mole peering out of its hole, the blue image showed on the far left edge of the Red Planet, practically in the atmosphere.

  “I am increasing magnification,” N7 said.

  Mars grew so we only saw a portion of the planet. The anomaly likewise gained size, and I saw it had a shark shape, although minus any dorsal fin. Instead, there was a rotating dish up there.

  “Is that a Starkien vessel?” I asked.

  “It would appear so: a cutter cl
ass, a scout.”

  “That clinches it,” I said.

  “The logical course is to destroy the scout,” N7 said. “I suggest we launch a missile and prepare to leave the solar system now.”

  “With three freighters still stuck down on the planet?” I asked.

  “The majority of something is better than nothing,” N7 pointed out.

  I frowned and rubbed my forehead, which was sweaty and hot. What should I do? To cut and run, and leave those half a million people to the Jelk Corporation…

  “Launch the missile,” I said. “And launch several drones farther out toward Neptune. If we decide to head to Jupiter, we’re going to want to give the Starkiens something to think about.”

  The solar system had three known jump points: one near Jupiter, another near Neptune and the last far beyond Pluto. Each jump point led through its own route and came out into vastly different star system.

  “I am launching the first missile,” N7 said, as he tapped his board.

  We didn’t feel anything. The battlejumper dwarfed the missiles, although they were bigger than the old cruise ship Queen Mary.

  “How many drones should I launch toward Neptune?” N7 asked. “Our supply is limited.”

  “Good question,” I said. “We don’t want to fire the drones yet if we’re not heading for the Jupiter jump point.”

  “I suggest that we must escape the solar system while the opportunity presents itself,” N7 said. “We must therefore begin now. The Starkiens block the Neptune jump point, so we must either try for Jupiter or Pluto.”

  “Do you think the Starkiens or the Jelk will have warships waiting at the other end of either of those two routes?” I asked.

  “Unlikely, but possible,” N7 said.

  I tapped my chin again, thinking. The distances involved in our solar system were huge. Light took approximately eight minutes, seventeen seconds to leave the Sun and reach Earth. Battlejumper teleoptics were many times more powerful than the Hubble telescope had been. They showed us the Starkien flotilla near Neptune. That information was already many hours old, the speed light took traveling from Neptune to Earth: something over four hours, if I remembered correctly. The same thing had occurred with the Mars scout, but within a much smaller timeframe, mere minutes instead of hours.