Storm Assault (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  “Navigation, weapons, and—what is the third?”

  “I don’t know yet. I think it has to do with life support, telecommunications and so forth. I’m focusing on the first two.”

  Miklos stepped forward and put out a gloved hand. He ran it gently over the nearest hexagonal button. The nanite arm that was attached to that particular button shivered slightly as if in response.

  “Very sensitive,” he said. “I’m beginning to understand the fascination you’ve had with this project, Colonel Riggs. I’m glad I came.”

  I clapped my hands together again and gave Miklos a beaming smile.

  “It’s great to hear you say that. Imagine the Imperials when they get a look at this thing!”

  My smile widened into a grin and Miklos shook his head at me.

  “What?” he said. “I can tell you have something else to show me.”

  “You’re right. This is the moment. Marvin, demonstrate what you’ve learned. I want to you to fly this monster!”

  Miklos laughed, and his eyes lit up with new enthusiasm. “You can fly it? Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

  “I wanted you to see it all from the start. I wanted you to appreciate the effort. When we turn on a TV, we never think of the wonders going on inside it. You do now, and you’ll always know how amazing Marvin’s accomplishments were.”

  We sounded a dozen alarms warning everyone to get to a safe place. We cleared the surface of the vast ship, launching every transport and getting all personnel safely off the hull. After all, we didn’t really know what the hell we were doing yet.

  Miklos nodded, looking around like a kid in a theme park. His transformation into a believer was complete. Marvin set about starting up the engines. It was for real this time. He engaged them and the ship lurched.

  First we were all thrown starboard, then we rolled aft. The ship felt like it was heeling over.

  “Let’s get to the table!” I shouted.

  We pressed ourselves against the navigational table. It was hooked up via a long nanite wire to the surface where sensors had been attached to the exterior. We watched as the ship slowly maneuvered in random directions. Marvin worked the controls with ever more gentle touches.

  “Don’t touch the screen,” I warned Miklos.

  Miklos pulled his fingertips away from the edge of the table in alarm. Both of us gripped the border around the edge with clamped on fingers, trying not to touch anything else.

  “It’s very sensitive, sir,” Marvin said. “My apologies for the rough ride.”

  “Everything is clear to me now, Colonel,” Miklos said, “you were so patient with my complaints. I didn’t understand your buoyant mood. Now I do. You weren’t inviting me for an inspection; you wanted me to experience the ship’s maiden voyage.”

  “Exactly, Commodore.”

  “I thank you for the experience,” he said, gripping the sides of the table less firmly now that Marvin wasn’t sending us into a new tailspin every thirty seconds. “One question remains in my mind, Colonel. Why didn’t you clear out this atmosphere inside the ship? It’s cloudy and roiling now. It must not help anyone attempting to fly the thing.”

  “We will, we will,” I said. “We’ll pressurize the entire interior someday with a fresh pine scent. Maybe we’ll even have swimming pools, shopping malls and parks. But for now, we lack the supply of gasses to replace what’s here. That sort of esthetic will have to wait.”

  Miklos looked up, frowning and swiveling his head. My eyes were riveted to the control screen. It looked to me like Marvin was doing it. The ship had changed course and was now bouncing away from the Centauri B. It wasn’t heading anywhere useful yet, but at least we weren’t going to burn up tomorrow.

  Miklos tapped me. “I’m betting those things are some kind of automated maintenance device?”

  “What?” I asked, following his pointing finger.

  There was something dark crawling down the nearby wall. My head swiveled this way and that, seeing more and more of them. They were coming from nowhere, hidden in the brown hazy air that hung up there until they got close.

  “I’m afraid those are cyborgs, Commodore,” I said. “Do you have a weapon handy?”

  “I’m never in the field without it.”

  “Good,” I said, drawing my own laser projector and aiming it at the closest cyborg I could see. “Start shooting. We’re under attack.”

  Marvin, who’d been utterly focused on flying his ship, appeared to be startled by my announcement. His cameras rose and panned in every direction.

  Everywhere he looked, there were black, crawling cyborgs.

  -22-

  They’d been waiting for us. Waiting for us to die.

  I figured it out as I battled with the crawling hordes. Why not attack earlier, in the middle of the night while we were resting? Because they didn’t think they had to. The ship was already as good as dead, spiraling out of control toward a hot yellow star. Why bother attacking the doomed idiots that populated the ship? Let them all burn.

  But when we managed to exert control over Phobos, they were forced to act. Their mission was clearly to destroy this ship. If we changed course, that was a problem for them.

  They came at us in surprising numbers. A week ago it had been Tolerance who’d experienced this sensation of shock. Now, it was our turn.

  “Hold the left flank, Commodore, I’ll deal with the ones on the right. Marvin, you—” I broke off, looking around. “Marvin?”

  He was gone. He’d lifted right up into the stinking haze and flown away. In a way, I didn’t blame him. He had no weapons equipped at the moment, but it was never fun to be abandoned.

  “We can’t hold them, sir,” Miklos said, “I suggest we retreat.”

  “They’ll destroy our control system.”

  “They’ll kill us first.”

  I shot one, then another. The second one got up, smoking, and crawled forward. It was slower, but not finished yet. I glanced over to see how Miklos was doing.

  Not so good. One was already on his leg. I realized he had only a fleet officer’s pistol. I grabbed him, shot the one attached to him repeatedly, then engaged my grav boots. We glided up into the swirling mist.

  They leapt up after us, and I fired repeatedly into the mass of them. There had to be thirty in sight now.

  Miklos did a smarter thing—he changed our direction. They didn’t seem to have control of their trajectory once they’d taken a leap, so they shot on past us and vanished into the brown haze above.

  “Good play, Commodore. We’ll go back to the encampment and gather the marines. They’ll be destroyed in ten minutes.”

  “Yes sir,” he said, sounding tired. “I’m not feeling so good, however. I wonder if you could take me to the infirmary.”

  I looked him over. He had holes in his suit. I cursed and shot him with extra nanites. They worked on sealing his suit, restoring pressure and healing his body at the same time.

  “You’re in for a full blood transfusion. Ever had one of those?”

  “No…sir…” he said faintly.

  “They suck.”

  Navigation wasn’t easy in a giant brown cloud, but I eventually got my HUD system working and flew to the encampment. I frowned as I landed, seeing the place was overrun with more cyborgs.

  “Where the hell is Kwon?” I roared.

  “Here, sir!” he shouted, materializing out of the mists.

  “Why wasn’t this area cleared, First Sergeant? I ordered this entire ship secured days ago.”

  “The enemy must have been hiding, sir. I don’t know where they came from. It’s a big ship, Colonel.”

  “Yeah.”

  I took the limp Commodore Miklos to the infirmary brick. I had to remove a cyborg who was trying to break into the airlock forcibly. When I keyed in my suit number and gained entry, a bolt whizzed by my head.

  “Check your fire!” I shouted. “Friendlies! Wounded!”

  A terrorized nurse and do
ctor rushed forward, gushing apologies. They took Miklos off my hands and told me about things that had been trying to break in.

  “Yeah, I noticed. I’m going back out. Keep your guns handy, but make sure you know what you’re shooting at. Oh, and the Commodore is going to need a full transfusion and an organ-cleansing.”

  He moaned. I patted his shoulder and left.

  Kwon was standing on top of the medical brick when I got outside.

  “This mist is a pain,” he said. “I can’t see them until they are almost on top of me.”

  All over the encampment laser fire flashed like lightning in a thick fog.

  “How many can there be?” I asked.

  “Thousands? I dunno,” Kwon said, firing at a crawling figure near the elevator shaft. “They’re like cockroaches. Big ones. They’re deadly if they get in close on a man. According to platoon chat, we’ve lost a marine already.”

  “Dammit. We can’t take losses now. Not right before we engage the Imperials. Not to mention, this is cutting into Marvin’s time. He needs every hour to get the ship under control.”

  “What are you orders, sir?” Kwon asked.

  “What forces do we have available?”

  “Three marine companies are stationed inside, sir.”

  “All right, I’m going to call up Fleet and order two more transport loads to secure the encampment, the giant control panel and the elevator shaft.”

  “We can do that with half the men, easy.”

  “Agreed. After that, my friend, we’re going to take five companies and march into the guts of this ship. We’re going to burn these cyborgs out, wherever they’re hiding.”

  “A bug hunt? Now you’re talking, sir!”

  About an hour later I had my reinforcements. The enemy attacks had slackened, but I wasn’t sure if they’d run out of troops or had simply retreated to bide their time. In either case, my answer to the problem was the same: burn them out.

  Kwon and I marched behind the lead platoon of Company B. Not knowing exactly where the enemy was coming from and having a gigantic ship to search, we’d split up in to five companies. We had a lot of ground to cover and not much time to do it in.

  Company B got to explore the generators—which was probably the worst assignment of the lot. The engines were smaller and although the radiation was intense back there, the marines should be able to do a full sweep before any became seriously ill. The plumb job had to be the life support systems patrol. Those forward chambers were essentially huge lung-like affairs that pumped and processed the massive volume of atmosphere inside the pressurized portion of the ship.

  As I moved between the massive, thrumming generators, I was further impressed by the incredible scale of the ship. It really felt like a ship when you were below decks in the guts of the thing. That’s the part I had trouble comprehending. While you were on the surface, or in the elevator shaft—even when you were in the titanic central chamber—you felt like you were on a planetoid of some kind, a naturally-formed, hollowed-out rock. But that wasn’t the case.

  Down in the bowels of the vessel, in the middle of twisted pipes and unshielded wires the size of fire hoses carrying fantastic currents, you knew you were on a ship. The structure was distinctly alien, which was most notable by the sheer size of every component.

  There were no decks to speak of. Instead of breaking the ship up into slices ten feet high and calling them decks, they’d bisected it. The upper half of the hollow area was Tolerance’s crew quarters and living space. The bottom half was packed with equipment.

  Our suit lights illuminated the immediate vicinity, but they could only go so far. Most of the chamber around us was pitch black.

  Kwon was just as awed as I was. “This is really amazing, Colonel. I can’t even see very far. It’s like being miles under the ocean.”

  “I’d rather be underwater. This place is wide open and unknown.”

  We were half-walking, half-rappelling down a pipe as we talked. Ahead of us was 1st Platoon, with the rest of Company B strung out along the same pipe leading up into the darkness overhead. A combination of repellers and magnetics kept us from falling off.

  Headlamps swung every which way as the men attempted to scan their environment for enemies. We walked on that way for about ten minutes with no end to the spiraling pipe in sight.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, calling a halt. “We need to get a hovercraft or something. We can’t see very far, and we still don’t have enough manpower to cover this much territory. Let’s back it up and see if we can find a better—”

  I broke off then as there was some kind of commotion among the troops in 1st Platoon ahead of me. I frowned down at them.

  “This isn’t time to be screwing around, lieutenant. Have you made contact with the enemy?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” she radioed back.

  “What is the nature of the problem, then?”

  As soon as I got those words out of my mouth, I was enlightened as to the nature of the problem. The pipe we were all standing on was…vibrating. It wasn’t a violent motion—not yet. But it was definitely disconcerting. As I joined the others in trying to locate a source for the movement a very bad thing happened.

  The coiling pipe came apart under our boots and fell into the darkness. Shouts rose up in my helmet, a chorus of freaked-out marines. I engaged the command override on the local channel and spoke to them all.

  “Turn off your magnetics! I want every battle suit on powered flight!”

  I could see they were already doing it, but some had not moved fast enough. They rode the falling pipe into the darkness. Their suit lights glimmered far away and still they fell.

  “If you went down with the pipe, get back up here. Form up floating platoons as you’ve done in training. Don’t get split up. It won’t take much power to maintain flight in this low grav environment.”

  I switched off the override then and let the sub-commanders sort it out. Kwon was at my side a moment later, zooming up from below me. He’d been taken down with the falling pipe.

  “Seems odd we have much gravity at all,” he said. “This rock is small and hollow—and we’re in the middle of it. Shouldn’t we be free-falling?”

  “It’s not exactly gravity pulling us down, it’s centrifugal force. The ship is under quite a bit of acceleration due to Marvin’s experiments.”

  “But…how come we feel acceleration when we have gravity control? Isn’t this whole ship about grav control?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a tech-talk, so I made an exasperated sound. In truth, I didn’t entirely understand the science behind gravity-control. To me, it was rather like controlling other physical forces, such as magnetism. Grav control systems worked like giant electromagnets you could switch on or off. By reversing the polarity, you could repel or attract other objects.

  But when it came to the edgy parts, such as how gravity control interacted with things like inertia and friction, I was in the dark. Kwon was getting into that gray area, and at very bad time.

  “Kwon, I don’t know the answer—and if I did, I doubt I could explain it to you now.”

  “Sorry sir. Where are we going next?”

  “Now that’s a reasonable question,” I said. I directed my suit lights toward a polyhedron about a hundred yards off. “Let’s take our unit over there and do a headcount.”

  The automatic systems in my command HUD tracked my troops, but didn’t give their positions. I liked to see who was with me, not just who was still alive. I was relieved to see everyone was still alive and functional when we reached the polyhedron and perched on it.

  As I checked on the status of the other platoons, however, I was shocked to see 4th Platoon had lost seven men. I attempted to contact the lieutenant in charge, but he wasn’t answering. Even as I did this, two more dots flickered out. 4th Platoon was in trouble.

  “1st Platoon, saddle up,” I said. “We’re going on a rescue mission.”

  Without waiting for a resp
onse, I launched out into space again. Somehow, flying inside Phobos was more disconcerting than doing so in open space. The difference was the existence of frequent dangerous obstacles. They loomed out of the dark and often had sharp edges. Some of them moved in sweeping arcs that could whack a man down like a fan blade hitting a moth. We shot down and to the right—at least that’s where it felt like we were going. The men of 1st Platoon were strung out behind me like a swarm of fireflies. Their suit lights glimmered in the darkness.

  We came to a broad, flat plane. On the surface of this plane a battle was raging. I watched as lasers flashed and cyborgs chased my men around like spiders catching flies.

  No one in 1st Platoon needed any orders. We zoomed down, firing as we came. We landed wherever there was room to put two feet together and joined the melee. The dance floor was soon crowded with struggling forms.

  It was the kind of battle the cyborgs dreamed of. We couldn’t hold them at range, and we couldn’t bring the full weight of our numbers against them. Many men dropped their lasers and drew combat blades right off. Limbs—both human and cyborg, drifted over our helmets.

  But the weight of our armor and weapons prevailed. From above us, the other platoons added more personnel until the cyborgs were overwhelmed. Having lost my knife in the chest of one that I’d tossed over the side into the abyss, I began grabbing them and pulling legs off them.

  When it was over, Kwon came to me and clapped me on the back. “That was great, sir. Almost as good as fighting Macros. I loved the way you tore pieces off them and tossed them around. You looked like an angry man who hates crabs or something.”

  I picked up a black, spiny, cyborg limb and examined it. “I do hate these things. They’re evil. They’re part human—you knew that, right?”

  “I disagree,” he said, shaking his head. “These things aren’t human at all. Just because there is some human meat in there, that doesn’t count. That’s like calling a man-eating tiger part human because he has someone’s ear in his belly.”

  I decided not to argue with Kwon’s logic. I tossed the cyborg arm out into space and did a headcount. Not bad, really. We’d only lost nine men in the entire company, and eight of those had been Centaurs.