A man with a bearded face moved into the visual pick up. “Remain where you are, and we let you live. Do anything, and we kill you all.” The bearded man’s eyes widened. “There is a Narth!”
Right after that statement, the terminal went black.
I said, “There is not a moment to lose. We need to get in our battlesuits and take our weapons before he opens this complex to the outside atmosphere or sends battle robots. We meet in five minutes at the main elevator.”
Now I cursed my decision not to read the second order chip earlier. I did take it out of the secret skin pocket, but there was no time to activate and listen to it.
Wetmouth flipped open the manual input keyboard from underneath the terminal, and her fingers flew over the symbols. “I have put the station computronic in a deep diagnostic cycle, which will cause it to shut down and restart. After such a reboot, it will have to be connected to Fleet Main before they can use it. That means they need to go to Environmental and shut down life support manually, and that isn’t done in a few moments. It also should disable most of the intruder containment systems of the base.”
Narth said, “I informed the Narth representative, and he will relay this information to Fleet Command.”
I praised them, “Good thinking, but now get going!”
The Auto-Dresser was not responding, getting a space or battlesuit was out. So I girded my blaster and went out.
Twelve S-10 Robots with shock batons stomped down the corridor and the lead unit snarled, “You are arrested. Resistance will be met with force.” I wondered why S-10 Robots were used for security on a base like this and not Cerberus Battle robots as usual. Not that I was complaining. We would have had no chance otherwise. I said to the lead bot, “No robot may arrest humans without a commanding officer present!”
The robot snarled, “Correct! Remain where you are till an officer arrives!”
I said, “No robot may issue commands to a human without a human supervisor present!”
Again, the robot followed its base programming and said, “Correct!”
The shock batons lowered. Those poor simple Multi-Use bots without computronic guidance were no real obstacle. So, I said to it, “Robot, weld all the elevator doors shut except the main shaft! Disengage communication equipment and follow verbally spoken commands only.”
“New order acknowledged.”
The others came running. Krabbel held four TKU blasters, Hans carried his big blaster, and Har-Hi wore his complete Dai battlesuit and handed me one of the old TKUI Rifles he had secured at Quagmire Bog.
He said to me, “Take this one. Looks like we have to go against bots and suited troops.”
“Am I the only one not traveling with an entire arsenal?” I said and looked at Wetmouth in surprise. She carried not only a blaster but also a long sword over her back, making me suddenly wish I had Mjördaren with me as well and I asked her, “A sword?”
She said, “It is a very special one; you’ll see!”
We went to the main elevator shaft. It was out of order, but Hans had little problem opening the sliding doors with force. I wanted to stick my head into the shaft, but Har-Hi pulled me back, and a laser beam singed my hair, luckily nothing else.
He said, “Part of the Intruder Containment System, independent from the main systems. We Dai lost quite a few men to those nasty shaft lasers in Union ships.” While he said that, he tossed a little round thing down the shaft.
We could hear the sharp shriek of laser beams and six sharp explosions. He then held one of his blades into the shaft and nodded. “My scan seeker has destroyed the nearby sensors.”
We all went in and climbed down the emergency ladder incorporated into the side of the wall. The shaft was barely lit and appeared to go on forever.
Har-Hi had taken point, and I was the last. He asked, looking up, “Where are we going exactly? Fighting our way to C&C and kill that bastard?”
I responded, “If they battle sealed it, it is as hard to penetrate as a battleship bridge. We go to the hangars and see if we can send a message with the Briggs TransDim Radio.”
Elfi said, “That’s a long way! Let’s hope we won’t run into any Cerberus Robots!”
Wetmouth, climbing just below me, said, “He is using S-10s all over the base because he cannot use Cerberus Robots. They are highly intelligent and have GalNet incorporated, and their programming cannot be altered.”
Cirruit, below Wetmouth, looked up. “Then we are lucky because there is a warehouse full of them! We wouldn’t stand a chance!”
I said, “That’s it then. We go and activate the Bots and let them secure the base!”
We had climbed all the way to the ground level, and I could barely feel my arms. It must have been 1000 meters at least. Hans had forced a door open; Cirruit yelled for me to look up and I saw the elevator car coming down at great speed! There was no way we could all make it through the hole before it hit us.
I fired my blaster into the rails, hoping to cut the power and engage the security breaks. The elevator car did come to a shrieking stop only about ten meters above my head
But molten metal showered down, and one blob of molten metal hit my wrist. It burned so bad I lost my grip on the ladder and fell!
A thin, barely visible silvery thread stopped my fall and Krabbel pulled me to safety; the elevator cabin rushed with speed centimeters past my feet, a heartbeat after I had cleared the shaft.
We had reached the ground level of the Crew Quarters tower. Access to the base concourse was blocked by a massive reinforced Ultronit Door. Commander Cardwell’s voice blared through the Base PA system, “I give you one last chance to surrender. I am no monster, and I make you an offer. I read your personnel files, and I know that Mr. Olafson has the highest security clearance there is. I need you and your code key to open a few doors for me. In exchange, I let your friends go free with the Brigg right away, and I will let you go on the first Free Space planet we stop. I even throw in a million credits! You should consider my offer. It is not a bad deal.”
He intensified his tone of voice, “To help you make up your mind, you need to know that there are four men in Quasimodos on your heels and when they reach you, the deal is off the table.”
Har-Hi whispered, “If he gets your key and codes and combines it with his key, he can open the Translocator warehouse! You know we must first die before we can have these get into the wrong hands.”
To Cirruit, I said, “Can you open that door somehow?”
“No, sorry, that thing weighs a hundred tons or more, made of molecular compacted Ultronit and the power is cut. It would take days to burn through it.”
Wetmouth pulled her sword and said with a confident tone in her voice, “I can cut it!”
At the same time, I could hear the heavy stomping of battlesuits from the other side of the corridor.
“Find cover!” I yelled and threw myself on the floor behind a sofa seat group.
Cirruit cried, “Holy mother-machine, that sword is cutting the Ultronit like paper!”
I didn’t turn to look but yelled, “Everyone protect Wetmouth while she cuts!” The doors that sealed the other end of this ground entry lobby and half the wall it was set in shattered as four Quasimodo Suits stomped in.
Har-Hi said with a calm voice, “Everyone, concentrate your fire on the left one!”
His strategy made sense; there was no way we could stop fully shielded Quasimodos with one or two blasters, but with all our firepower combined, we could wear them down one after the other.
I fired and so did my friends. Twelve thermokinetic bolts hammered into the shields of the first suit, due to the fact that we used these old-style super-strong TKUs and Krabbel firing four at the same time, the Quasimodos’ shields were overwhelmed almost instantaneously. The wearer did not use his additional forcefield shield he could have deployed from his underarm and, thankfully, it was not a heavy assault version. The first man died a heartbeat later. If he or the others had been trained
marines, we would have been toast by now. But whoever used those suits now had no training and it was obvious they still had even trouble walking straight. As easy as it might sound, it was quite a challenge to walk in a Quasimodo battlesuit, especially in a confined. Every move was augmented and even a little step ended up being a giant stomp.
A blast roared over my head, missing me by a good five meters. Still, the air became very hot. I fired into the ceiling above, showering the next two with molten metal. One of them instinctively raised his arm to protect his face; it was a reflex even though the metal could not have hurt him.
It gave me time to send a second blast into the floor. This trick had served me well against the Y’All, and it worked better here. The man stumbled and while he was trying to keep balance accidentally backhanded the one next to him with his left arm.
Har-Hi yelled, “Everyone, close your eyes and ears!”
A second later, an ear-shattering boom actually lifted me off the floor, and a stinging hot pressure wave rolled over me, pressing the air out of my lungs. I smelled the distinctive scent of burned hair.
When I could see again, the rear half of the room was gone. There now was a crater of molten metal and two suited men dying in screaming agony as their suits melted around them. The fourth was still standing, but his neck snapped suddenly inside his helmet, and he collapsed as well.
Har-Hi said, with an apologetic expression on his face, “Sixteenth of a gram AM Grenade was a tad more than I expected.”
I said, quite angrily, “You realize that we are on a planet with a hostile atmosphere?”
He apologized and said, “I calculated the safety margin to the outside walls from here to be adequate. I forgot you don’t wear armor.”
It actually hurt when I grinned, and I expected to have at last first-degree burns on my face. “Well, it worked, and I should be glad you even have such a thing with you.”
He said, “I always do. I am Dai!”
Krabbel assured me that the singed hair of his legs would grow back, and Narth confirmed he was also all right.
We went back to the blocked entrance and to our surprise, Wetmouth’s sword had cut big chunks out of the several meter thick emergency door. Her mysterious sword sliced through reinforced molecular compacted Ultronit as if cutting butter with a hot knife.
Barely containing his amazement, Har-Hi gasped, “What kind of blade is this?”
She had carved a neat tunnel into the metal and now made a final circular cut. She answered without stopping, “It is a very unique sword. I’ll tell you how I got it at a later time.”
Hans stomped against the last piece she just had cut, and a meter thick disc of at least two tons of Ultronit clanged onto the shiny floor of the spaceport concourse, and the way was open. Har-Hi glued something into the breach Wetmouth had just cut, and explained, “Proximity mine, a full gram!”
We had made it into the base main terminal. Six men, armed but not in battlesuits, were totally surprised by our presence and were burned to atomic ashes before they could send one bolt in our direction.
Cirruit said, pointing the way, “We have to make it across the main lobby, cut again through one of these Ultronit doors and into the connection tunnel, traverse it and cut into the warehouse section and—” Cirruit collapsed as if someone had cut the strings of a puppet. Simultaneously, all the lights went out! Our weapons went into safety lock and shut down.
Elfi pointed at a group with a Tech Stop projector across the hall, and three of them struggled to put a P4 Paralysator on its tripod.
Hans grabbed the several ton piece of metal Wetmouth had cut and threw it like a giant Frisbee all the way across the lobby before the Paralysator beam hit him first!
The disk hit them with force and destroyed the Paralysator and smeared the three men into stains across the floor.
The other two manning the Tech Stop projector dropped to the floor with their heads twisted to their backs. Despite the fact that I would have killed them, too, I felt sick to the stomach seeing how deadly Narth’s telekinetics were.
I shouldered Cirruit, and noticed how heavy he was, and said, “Everyone, see if you can drag Hans!”
Without Narth, we would have had no chance to get our big Saturnian friend across to the next door. Hans floated behind Narth, and together we made it to the tunnel entrance. Again, Wetmouth’s sword cut through the metal and sliced a big round passage. An enormous detonation rolled across the lobby and Har-Hi grinned, “Amateurs!”
We made it unhindered through the tunnel. Cirruit was starting to move, and I lowered him to the ground. He sat up in a very mechanical motion, his head turned completely to his back, and his eyes blinked in red and green colors. Finally, his white, expressionless mechanical pupils rolled into their sockets, and his head rotated into the normal position.
He got back on his feet and said, with a coarse, more-mechanical voice than usual, “Tech Stop does things to me you don’t want to know. Any more of it and I would not be able to get up again.”
Wetmouth administered a drug into Hans that she had taken out of her small first aid kit. After a few moments, Hans also moved, still groggy but able to get up and walk.
With our friends back on their feet, Wetmouth cut the next locked door, and I rolled through it first. Again, two men were putting a large weapon together. Too far away to be jumped, my blaster still deactivated, I pulled the .45 and fired. Neither man wore shields but both had armor. One of them I hit square between the eyes, proving that this old chemical slug thrower was still quite deadly. The other was not hurt, as the slugs careened off his helmet, but the impacts of the two shots made him stumble back and a flickering metal streak managed to hit past his raised arms through a tiny opening right into his mouth. One of Har-Hi’s knives, showing only part of the grip, stuck out between his teeth.
We rushed into the room, and Cirruit said, “Down that corridor are the Cerberus storages.”
Twenty-five men in battlesuits and a strange six-legged being with purple fur, all heavily armed, dropped from the ceiling! One of them was the base commander in a fully operational Cerberus, and by his moves, he knew how to use it. He was, after all, a trained Union officer.
He held a strange device. “This is a Saresii Psi Seeker. If the Narth even so much as tries a Psionic trick, you all die. Your weapons do not work, ours do! Surrender now!”
The bearded man we had seen before stepped forward and the purple animal jumped the entire fifteen meters that separated us. I fired the Colt three times, and all three slugs hit their target, and into the belly of the being. I was certain I’d killed it, but my slugs could not stop its momentum and it hit me full force. Something painful stung me into the stomach and chest, and I fell backward, buried almost completely by that purple animal. Everything around me begun to dissolve into a blurred mix of colors and lights, and through this haze, I heard a voice, “The Wurlag stung him; it’s over for him!” And then there was nothing.
Chapter 12: Rewards
When I came around, I was still lying under that purple thing. The armed and fully armor-suited men were close now, holding their weapons ready, pointing them at my friends.
The bearded dark-skinned man wearing a battlesuit of unknown origin argued with Cardwell, “I want you to open those Translocator storages now. We do not have much time.”
Cardwell pointed at me and barked, “I told you that two command codes are needed to open them. The only one able to do that was killed by your idiotic pet!”
“Be very careful, Cardwell. Your usefulness has ended!”
The base commander’s Quasimodo hand snapped around the throat of the bearded pirate and he hissed, “I am still the commandant of this base, and I am wearing a Quasimodo. Unlike your goons, I know how to use it.”
The pirate struggled and coughed. “You are nothing; now unhand me. Do you think I trusted you while you put on that suit? I put a Eugeletrian Sneegal in it while it was still open and it might just crawl to the base of y
our neck. Not even your Auto-Doc can prevent the effects of those little suckers’ poison.”
Caldwell dropped the man and opened his helmet, which was my chance. No one paid any attention to me, and I fired my last round. The bullet hit Caldwell right under the chin, and the effect of the heavy lead projectile was quite gruesome. My friends didn’t need more distraction to react.
Wetmouth’s strange sword sliced one of the men from shoulder to hip, battlesuit and all. Hans hammered both of his fists and all his might on the helmeted head of the third.
The rest tried to use their weapons, but they did not work. Cirruit said, “Nanites are so useful!”
The armor of the next disassembled itself and the pieces dropped to the floor, and he stood there as naked as on the day of his birth. Narth’s eyes glowed no longer yellow but deep red, and his voice was no longer recognizable. “You have felled my Hugavh sharer. You have harmed my friend. You shall know and learn that Narth has learned the meaning of rage!”
Twenty pirates slowly rose from the floor and, with sudden popping sounds, the insides of their helmets were splashed with dark-red matter and they all dropped lifelessly to the ground.
Several strands of Spider silk hit the bearded man. He was pulled with force close to Krabbel, who turned him with dizzying speed between his hind legs, and Cardwell was turned into a cocoon, battlesuit and all, in less than a few seconds.
Wetmouth came over and sliced his helmet off.
I raised my hand and said as loud as I could, “Cirruit, go activate the Cerberus. Do not let anything distract you!”
Cirruit was a certified Translocator technician. A fact that was not mentioned in the non-classified section of his personnel file and had Blue-Blue-Yellow clearance, I held out my code key and said, “Day code is strawberry.”
Cirruit ran with machine speed and out of my sight.
Hans lifted the purple thing off me, and Wetmouth dropped to her knees, examining me. She looked up to the others and said, “The Wurlag has stunned him!”
Eric Olafson: Space Pirate Page 25