Storm Assault (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  “Good luck, Colonel!” he called over his shoulder, throwing me a salute.

  I saluted him back and climbed into a fighter. There wasn’t time to get into a drop pod, and we were too far from the enemy ship to allow such a delivery system in any case.

  A few minutes later, I was rocketing down the tube, howling with the thrill of acceleration. Damn, these birds made fine rides.

  -18-

  As I roared through space leaving my fleet behind, I did feel a trifle exposed. Creeping doubts entered my mind. What if Tolerance had been bullshitting me instead of the other way around? It was hard to imagine the big steam cloud being able to pull it off, but he’d heard his share of whoppers from me in the past. Maybe he’d learned how to lie like a human.

  I began to think of what I would have done in his position. Playing dead and luring the enemy commander in close for a good thrashing sounded like a nice start to any captain’s day. Could it be?

  Nah. I didn’t buy it. The Blues were the straight-men of the universe, and because they had emotions and a sense of honor they were easier to fool than the machines could ever be. What I had to worry about, I told myself, was these cyborg things. Tolerance had never gotten around to telling me just how many were crawling around in the core of his ship.

  Still, despite my self-confidence, I felt my guts clench up into a hard ball when I got close to the moon-sized ship. I even began to question my own sanity in coming out here—alone or otherwise.

  Phobos was huge. It was just like approaching a planetoid, something I’d done any number of times in the past. It was almost impossible to think of the thing as a ship at all because it was so damned big. It had a curved horizon and the distant suns reflected from the dusty surface with glaring white light. The only hint that it was an artificial structure lay in its nearly perfect spherical shape.

  Squinching up my eyes, I passed the no-return point about ten minutes into the trip. This was where I was within the documented effective range of the enemy blanket weapon. From here on out, Tolerance could crush me with a flip of the switch, reducing my ship and the squishy body inside down to the size of a toaster oven.

  It didn’t happen, but no one gave my guts the all-clear. I felt a trifle sick by the time I landed on the northern pole of the moon-like vessel and made my way toward the forward sunken structure. Was Tolerance watching me even now, his gaseous finger on a gelatinous button? Was he giggling, thinking he’d let me get almost to the finish line before springing his deadly trap? I had no idea, so I scooted quickly over the smooth ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. My grav boots left furrows on the surface behind me where the force pushed away the sand-like material that coated the hull.

  Getting inside the crater-like region at the northern pole was a relief. Deep shadow fell over me plunging me into a relatively cool, gloomy interior. This had to be the main weapon—maybe it was the only weapon. We’d figured out there were only two major, distinguishing features on Phobos. One was in the aft region, which corresponded with the southern pole. That was the engine emissions port—only it didn’t emit anything that we could determine other than gravity waves.

  I was inside the forward structure now. It looked like a parabolic dish, something akin to a giant TV satellite dish. Over a mile wide, we figured it had to be the big gun as it always seemed to be aiming in the general direction of anything that got crunched.

  I could have flown the fighter right down into the mouth of this thing, but I hadn’t dared. The fighter had weaponry aboard, and I didn’t want Tolerance to construe the action as an attack. I wanted to appear as harmless as possible.

  I was, in fact, feeling very harmless as I plunged down into the conical interior of the structure. Seen up-close, the surface was not smooth. It resembled a honeycomb of hexagonal holes. Each of these openings was about a meter wide and black inside. I could have gone down into one of those holes, but I didn’t dare. Instead, I flew over them and drove onward toward the small end of this monstrous cone.

  There, at the very bottom, I found something new. There were oblong black corpses lying and half-floating here and there. The gravity was so low, it left bodies in odd, twisted patterns rather than pulling them down into a flat position. Stains of spilled liquids were everywhere, and they’d congealed into odd patterns. In a vacuum, liquids tended to vaporize, but these didn’t. They’d formed nearly spherical beads that glistened in the dim interior.

  I had no doubt I was looking at dead Worms. There had to be more than a hundred of them. How had they died? Were they all taken out at once? I didn’t know, so I pressed onward.

  At the bottom of the cone, I found another kind of dead. These were smaller and metallic. I paused on my journey to examine and film these aberrations. It took me only a moment to identify them.

  “I think these things are dead cyborgs,” I told my recording system as I scanned the area. “They must have been caught on their infiltration attempt to reach the interior. Either that, or the Worms met up with them and they wiped each other out. I can tell there was some use of gravity weaponry. I can see small black wads of metal here and there about the size of a deck of cards. I think these are the remains of other cyborgs, crushed down by Tolerance.”

  I was recording my words but not transmitting them. I didn’t want to take the chance of pissing Tolerance off. I’d gotten this far—all the way down onto the hull of his ship—and now wasn’t the time to give the big bastard the slightest opportunity to change his mind. For all I knew, transmitting my observations would incriminate me, turning me into an instant spy.

  I pressed onward, leaving the dead Worms and cyborgs and their clingy balls of blood behind. I found an opening at the bottom of the cone that was as alarmingly large as everything else. It must have been a hundred yards in diameter. This must have been what the previous invaders had been fighting to reach.

  Here, there were more bodies. The scene was easy to comprehend. There were both Worms and cyborgs locked in death together. They’d died fighting one another.

  It was strange, finding evidence of an open battle with no humans involved. I felt a pang for the Worm commandoes who’d given their lives here. I wondered if they’d lived long enough to see their fleets destroyed overhead. Judging by Marvin’s translation of the symbols they’d sent us, I figured they had survived the initial landing. They’d ended up here, dying in combat against a strange new enemy—this time built by Crow’s Imperial forces.

  I flew down into the abyss at the bottom of the cone and kept going. I could see vague shapes ahead—geometric metal cones, rods and polyhedrons that thrust up from below. They gleamed now and then when the starlight caught them.

  I frowned at the interior, baffled. It looked like the inside of an old TV set down here, blown up a thousand times in magnitude. Glimmering things like vacuum tubes and silver exposed wires the size of sewer pipes went everywhere.

  Not daring to land on the metallic surface, which seemed to crackle with power, I turned and drifted, using my suit’s grav plates. I was looking for a way out of this chamber, a way to enter the craft’s core.

  Unsurprisingly, the cyborgs showed me the way. Their bodies were evident here and there as I shined my suit lights down on them. I finally found an opening that didn’t look like it had been on the original blueprints.

  It was a jagged hole at the bottom of the place, in between two large components that looked for all the world like a pair of giant vacuum tubes.

  They’d burned their way in. I could see it all now. They’d come down all over the ship, landing like fleas on a passing dog. But then the dog had shaken itself and killed many of them. Fortunately for the fleas, the dog was slow and could only shake about once every ten minutes. After the first bunch had been killed, the next wave made it inside the beast where they were immune to the gravity weapon.

  From the interior, they must have burned this hole in the floor. It hadn’t damaged the main weapon—at least, not that I could see. But it had allowed them
to get in behind the circuitry and to keep going deeper.

  I followed their path. The scarred metal was ringed with flanges like a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. I pressed through, letting these teeth scratch and screech on my suit.

  Deep inside the gravity weapon, things weren’t any less dangerous. Almost immediately, I found another dead cyborg. This one wasn’t crushed down like a bug under a shoe, however. It must have touched the pipe-like exposed silver wires. Fried in an instant, its dry husk lay where it had fallen.

  I frowned down at the mess. Its blood had been boiled way, and the immediate area was brown as if a flash fire had occurred.

  I didn’t like the look of this. Had this one comparatively tiny short disabled this mammoth weapon? It seemed bizarre, but I realized that I hadn’t see Tolerance fire his single big gun, not since the cyborg assault.

  Looking around, I found nothing non-conductive at hand. I turned on my suit recorder again.

  “Hmmm,” I said. “I’m going to try to move this dead bug. I think it’s worth taking a chance. If I die and this recording somehow survives me, take this as a cautionary tale.”

  I found one of the big vacuum tube things and put my back up against it. Reaching back, I gripped the tube firmly—but not so hard I chanced cracking it.

  Then I aimed the bottom of one of my boots toward the dead cyborg and turned on the grav power.

  The boot bucked up against me, and I had to lock my knee. It threatened to push me right off into a spin, but I held on grimly.

  Slowly, the repelling forces coming from the bottom of the boot pressed the dead cyborg away. The effect was similar to that which every leaf-blower causes. The cyborg was a particularly stubborn leaf, but he did finally fly away.

  I glided close again and examined my efforts. The contact was burnished but appeared dry and serviceable. Maybe there was a breaker somewhere that needed to be flipped, but I could only do so much. As far as I could tell, the short was fixed and the weapon should work again.

  I continued on, heading deeper into the interior of the ship. After following a long, winding tunnel I came to a huge chamber. I had to press hard to enter here through the gusty shaft that whistled and bubbled with pressure. I checked my suit readings and realized I was now in a pressurized area.

  “I must have passed through some kind of airlock, but I didn’t see the hatch,” I told my recorder, turning around twice to video everything.

  The interior of the ship was dark and smoky. A brown haze like L. A. smog hung inside the chamber. It was so thick and dark I didn’t want to even try to breathe it, but I’d made a promise and I needed Tolerance’s cooperation.

  First, I unlimbered the single piece of unusual equipment I’d brought along on this trip: a conch shell-like translating device. Using a small brain box and what amounted to a megaphone, I began talking to Tolerance—or at least, I hoped I was doing so.

  “This is Colonel Kyle Riggs,” I said, instantly wondering at the wisdom of clearly identifying myself. There had been times in my life when the simple act of saying those words had brought unfriendly fire in my direction.

  I waited, listening to the crackle and hiss of the translation unit. Nothing intelligible came out of it.

  “I repeat, this is Colonel Kyle Riggs. Tolerance, are you here? I’ve come a long way to meet with you.”

  I waited again, becoming impatient. I reached to key it again a minute later when I thought I heard something. I immediately adjusted the gain.

  “…out…”

  That was it. I frowned. Was he telling me to get the hell out? As an afterthought, I flipped on the suit recorders again.

  “Tolerance, I heard you, but only barely. Are you here? I see some turbulence in the mist locally. We are so physically different—”

  I stopped talking, because I thought I heard the voice again.

  “…out…your shell…”

  I’m slow, just ask any girl I’ve ever gone out with, but I finally got the message. I reached up and spun the releases on my helmet, causing it to open like a tiny hatch. Soon, my exposed head was wreathed in cold, disgusting gasses.

  The atmospheres of planets like Jupiter aren’t pleasant. They’re largely made of methane, helium, hydrogen and various corrosives. In short, they stink like nothing any human has ever experienced back on Earth. But I’d been especially built to withstand this kind of medium. Back when I’d first entreated with the Blues, I’d let Marvin go wild and modify my body for survival in this type of environment. I’d never had him change me back—if such a thing was even possible.

  My skin could take splatters of acid. My lungs could breathe what amounted to a mix of farts and jet exhaust without choking—at least for a short period. Surviving in such an environment wasn’t the same thing as enjoying it. A gush of nastiness entered my suit and went all the way down to my sweating feet.

  Alarmed, my suit beeped and little fans fired up, hopelessly trying to blow away the big stink that had invaded my airspace. I appreciated the effort, despite the futility of it. At least the fans made my feet fractionally cooler and drier down in the bowels of my armor.

  I closed my eyes, of course. I didn’t need to see Tolerance, and he didn’t need to lick my eyeballs.

  Slowly, I counted backwards from fifty down to one. I didn’t want him to feel shortchanged. When I was done, I slowly closed up my suit again.

  After I had the seals back, I still only breathed in hitching coughing gasps. I waited until the filtration system cleared things up enough, and tried to speak. The words came out as squeaks at first, but after a few coughing spasms, I managed to be intelligible.

  “Are you happy now, Tolerance?” I asked.

  “…no…”

  “Well, are you satisfied that I did as I said? That I allowed you to commune with me in your final moments?”

  “…unpleasant…”

  “Yeah, well, you stink too. But I did what I said I would do. Right?”

  “…documented. I can die now…”

  I frowned. Die? Was all this for nothing then?

  “Can I do anything to save you?”

  “…you are me…we have mixed…”

  Great. I frowned in my suit. I’d always found these guys strange and faintly disgusting. As far as this cloud was concerned, we’d just melded or something and shared one another’s essence. I knew that in the culture and biology of the Blues, they considered themselves immortal after melding with other creatures. Part of their gas was forever part of the next guy’s each time they met and felt each other up. I didn’t like the connotations, and was always left with an urge to spit and rinse.

  “Look,” I said, “you’re still talking. Let us help. Turn off your weapon. Let us fly down here and chase out these cyborgs. I have engineers and plenty of people to help. I even have a crazy robot that might be able to figure out and repair your technology.”

  “…too late…”

  “Just turn off your weapon,” I said slowly and clearly. “I’ve proven to you we’re here to help, I’ve—”

  “The weapon no longer functions.”

  I stopped, mouth agape. I’d come down here alone for nothing? I thought of the damage the cyborgs had done inside the weapon electronics. They’d shorted it out like a moth on a circuit board.

  “Why didn’t you allow me to bring serious help?” I demanded.

  “…only you…”

  “Yeah, I know. Now I’m here, and I can’t do much by myself. Your suspicious nature has screwed you, Tolerance. I’m now going to call my people. They’ll come and land. Possibly, if you hang on long enough we’ll be able to save your worthless gas bag life.”

  I tried to open a channel to my fleet, but found I couldn’t. I cursed. I should have left a nanite wire down to here. But I supposed with all the exposed high voltage contacts I’d passed, it would have been too dangerous.

  Turning around, I glided up the wall, heading toward the ruptured entrance I’d found. I planned to follow the tunn
el out to the surface again. From there, I could call the marines. This place would be swarming within an hour.

  “…wait…”

  “Wait for what?” I asked.

  “…they’re almost here…”

  I felt an icy chill. Who was almost here? There was only one reasonable answer: the cyborgs. The very monsters that had found a way to kill this giant ship.

  I heard something new then over my translation device. Faintly, it translated into a bubbling sound. The gases around me swirled and burbled.

  I’d heard this before when I’d visited the Blues on Eden-11. Tolerance was laughing.

  -19-

  I didn’t make it to the tunnel. A figure appeared in front of me in the mouth of the gouged-open tunnel. It was unmistakably a cyborg. It’s central body had an ovoid shape. Its black arms were crusted by hair-like spines. Seen clearly in my suit lights, it looked to me like a headless, wingless fly.

  It crawled out of the hole on its thin, scuttling legs. There were hooks and barbs all over the thing, just like the first one I’d encountered.

  With a curse and grunt, I pulled up my laser projector. Connected by a black nanite cable to the power generator on my back, it had a gauge on top. I was thirty percent low already after having flown so far to get into the ship.

  I lifted the projector to blast the bug, but it wasn’t there. I’d only looked down for a second—where had it gone?

  I twisted this way and that, but armored spacesuits aren’t easy to see out of. It was like being in car; you couldn’t see anything that was too close…

  I felt a new weight on my legs, and felt a shuddering sensation through my suit. It was on me. Despite my armor, I shouted in alarm. There’s something about having a giant, headless fly latch onto you and starting to dig its way in—call me squeamish, but I felt a chill run down my spine.

  The critter was in too close to use the laser projector safely, but I tried anyway. I press the business end to its body and squeezed the trigger.

  I half-expected the resulting beam of light to burn a gash into my armor, but it didn’t. I managed to burn the cyborg instead. The thing went spinning away, thrashing. Tiny droplets of poison glittered in its wake, left behind by a thousand hair-thin spines. I knew that if they got into my suit and stung me with that stuff before I got off this ship, I’d never make it back to the fleet in time. Paralysis would set in, and I’d be a goner.