[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum

by Steve Perry - (ebook by Undead)

  “Pine. You run your base, Major. I’ll take care of Spears.”

  The man nodded again, and Wilks turned away. He wouldn’t order anybody to shoot the general but he would stand aside and let Wilks do it. Fine. Whatever it took.

  “Come on, Billie. I’d feel better if you stuck with me.”

  “What about Bueller?”

  “He’s okay. He’s standing by the life-support controls until we’re sure what’s what.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To give Spears a welcome home party. Once he’s gone, we’re gonna put all his pet monsters to Billie shook her head. “Thank God.” “Whoever. Let’s go.”

  16

  “Sir, the storm has passed. We can lift whenever you are ready.”

  Spears nodded, pointed one finger at the trooper in a kind of salute. “Load “em up.”

  The men hustled toward the hopper, eager to get out of the place. The air plant belonged to the aliens now, and his human troops were afraid to be here. They didn’t have anything to worry about, as long as Spears had a use for them. Soon they would, but not right now. A good general didn’t waste materiel until he could see suitable replacement for it on the horizon.

  Spears climbed into the trooper carrier and moved to the control cabin. The pilot had all systems online, doubtless had had them ready for some time. Spears grinned. “Lift it,” Spears commanded.

  The hopper rumbled with power and then surged up a hair, enough to clear the landing area floor. It began to move forward slowly. Once it was clear of the plant, the little ship would become like an arrow shot at a distant target, would hang a lazy parabola, decelerating against the faint gravity for the last portion of the flight. POC—piece of cake.

  “I don’t hear the beacon,” Spears said.

  “Probably some residual crosspole flurries, sir. Flux whirlpools causing interference. It’s not uncommon after a big storm.”

  “Is our com working?”

  “All systems are green, yes, sir.”

  “Call Third Base. Coded squirt, advising them of our status.”

  “Sir.”

  The pilot slid one finger across a motion-sensitive contact bar, then touched a keypad next to it.

  The general watched. Waited.

  “There’s the response, sir,” the pilot said. “Ackno, confirm, green and green.”

  Spears rubbed at his chin with his thumb. Missed a spot with the depil last time he’d wiped the whiskers off. Just a couple of hairs, but that was sloppy. Sloppy was bad. Sloppy could get you dead.

  “Call “em back. Punch in code 096-9011-D, that’s delta.”

  “Sir? I don’t recognize the code—”

  “You aren’t supposed to, son. Just do what you’re told.”

  “Yessir.”

  The pilot tapped in the numbers.

  The hopper had full holoprojics. After a moment the screen area over the console blossomed, swirled for a moment, then remained a pale and featureless blue. A clear signal.

  “Well, well,” Spears said. “We’ve got trouble at home.”

  “Sir? There’s nothing there.”

  “Exactly.”

  The pilot looked puzzled. Spears said, “You don’t know the story of the barking dog, do you, son?”

  The pilot shook his head.

  “Back on Earth, long time ago, there was a famous investigator working on a crime. While listing the clues, he said, And of course, there’s the matter of the dog barking in the night.” His assistant, who had been compiling the evidence, said, “But the dog did not bark.” “Precisely,” the detective said.”

  The pilot might as well have been in suspended animation, midpoint in a fifty-year sleep. Spears shook his head. “The signal is not supposed to be clear,” the general said. “That it is means there is a problem.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  Whether he did or not didn’t matter. Spears was not so inept that he would leave his base without stringing a few noisemakers. Time to try another one. There was always a chance that the magnetic storm had damaged some electronics.

  “Put the ship back down where it was,” Spears said.

  “Sir?”

  “A little detour. Don’t worry about it.”

  * * * * *

  Wilks pushed the helmet back on the E-suit. The heaters in the crawler had the somewhat stale air warm enough to breathe and keep his ears from freezing. Billie sat in the co-operator’s chair, waiting for him to tell her what he wanted.

  “Okay, we have to assume that his hopper has got firepower equal to ours, so we have to shoot first. The weaponry here is like that on the APC we flew on the aliens” homeworld. Robot guns, computer-operated, 20mm expended uranium armor-piercing slugs. All we have to do is plug the target in, like so…” He tapped in the specs for a light military hopper. “Light the system, here He lifted a protective cover, pressed a button. The fire control screen flicked on. “Security code, courtesy of Major Powell, thus…” The screen flashed.

  ARMED, it Said. SYSTEM READY.

  “That’s it. Everything is automatic from here on. The ship gets into range, our system hoses it.”

  “He’s got twenty-five troopers with him,” Billie said. “You ever hear the expression ‘burning down the barn to get rid of the rats’?”

  “Depends on how nasty the rats are, kid. The guys with him are on his side. You can’t think about them or their families or anything like that.”

  “That’s cold, Wilks.”

  “War is ugly, Billie. People die. Sometimes the choice comes down to you or them. If Spears gets back here and rallies the troops who might be loyal to him, the rest of us are going to wind up feeding mama bug and the little ones. In a perfect universe there wouldn’t be any need for soldiers or marines. In this one, there is.”

  Billie nodded, despite her feelings. He was right, she knew it. She had killed before, both APs and humans. She remembered the pirate who had attacked their ship, and how he would have blown them all out of existence. She didn’t like it, but Wilks was right.

  “But if the guns are automatic, why do we have to be here?”

  He shrugged. “Like a pilot on a commercial arc ship. In case something goes wrong. A circuit could overload, something could jam, maybe the guns work fine but somebody gets clear of the hopper in an escape pod and keeps coming. We’re backup.”

  Billie repressed a sigh. Humans, backing a death-dealing machine. She sometimes wondered if people were any better than the aliens. They were killers, but more like ants or bees. Beast of prey, they hunted to feed, not for sport. And she doubted if they ever planned an ambush of their own kind.

  Then again, Billie had no desire to become dinner for the monsters. She had come too close too many times already And people like Spears, like those turncoats on Earth who caught and gave their fellow humans to the aliens, those kind of people were psychotic. Whatever it took to stop them had to be done. She just wished she wasn’t the one who had to do it.

  “General? The hopper is ten klicks out.”

  Spears, looking at a computer read, turned toward the pilot. “Keep it on standard approach.”

  “Sir.”

  The hopper in which they rode smelled musty, the air stale, and while everything worked as it was supposed to work, the little ship felt loggy. Spears could understand that; the backup vessel had been in storage at the air plant for more than a year, parked and sealed, awaiting just such a use as this. The hopper on which they had flown from the base was five kilometers ahead of them now, empty of personnel, being piloted on remote by the man who normally would be flying this vessel. The copilot seated next to him kept the chase hopper on an even path, same altitude, same speed. Not that it was really necessary—this ship had a major advantage over the drone ahead of them; this ship wore a full stealth suit, would be invisible to radar or Doppler, and with the flat-black anodized hull damned near invisible to eyeballing against the dark of space. Still, if the hide-me suit somehow malfunctioned, a lazy
radar operator would see a double blip and probably think it was a ghost. Since there weren’t supposed to be any other hoppers the same size away from the base—this one didn’t show on records anywhere, Spears had seen to that—then the operator who might see it, if the stealth gear failed, would not be unduly worried. And if, in this very unlikely scenario, the tech didn’t scramble a code, he would be fed to the aliens when Spears got back. The general had no use for such troops, even if he was the one trying to fool them.

  “Five Wicks, sir.”

  “Steady as she goes, son.” This could all be a waste of his trump, but Spears had learned it was better to be cautious than dead. Time was running down on this planetoid anyway. There were big things in the offing, worlds to conquer, glory to be reaped. Wars to be won.

  Spears grinned. And victory begins at home, doesn’t it?

  “Here they come,” Wilks said. “Right down the pipe.”

  The tiny green dot on the gunnery radar screen moved toward the center. After a moment, the dot began to pulse, alternating now between green and amber.

  target initially acquired, flashed across the bottom of the screen.

  “It’s a match,” Wilks said.

  The alternating dot continued to pulse, then went from green/amber to red.

  TARGET CONFIRMED. TO ABORT FIRING YOU MUST ENTER CANCEL CODE.

  Wilks glanced at Billie. Shook his head. “All yours,” he said, knowing that the computer wouldn’t understand the comment.

  The pulsing dot expanded, became the outline of the hopper. A blue grid appeared on the screen in one corner, then expanded to cover the hopper. A bull’s-eye ring lit in bright green, centered on the hopper.

  SIXTY SECONDS TO OPTIMUM FIRING DISTANCE.

  A timer began counting down from sixty toward zero.

  Wilks watched Billie. She stared at the screen, blinked rapidly. Her breathing speeded up. At fire minus thirty seconds, she said, “Jesus, it’s like watching an execution.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  FIFTEEN SECONDS TO OPTIMUM FIRING DISTANCE.

  Wilks tapped a control on the external monitor.

  The tracking cam gave him a star-sprinkled black. “There it is,” he said, as much to himself as Billie. A tiny dot, the running lights barely visible.

  FIVE SECONDS TO OPTIMUM FIRING DISTANCE;—

  The hydraulics of the guns whined slightly as they moved the weapons, tracking the incoming ship.

  OPTIMUM FIRING DISTANCE. COMMENCE FIRING.

  The machine guns were recoilless so the vessel around them didn’t shudder, but the weapons vibrated, shaking them as if they had developed a sudden palsy. And the vacuum outside didn’t carry any sound, but some of the hull and air inside did. The reports were muted by the dampers, the noise almost like a thick sheet of canvas being ripped. Every tenth round was a tracer, and the guns fired so rapidly that there seemed to be a continuous line of colorful fire splashing against the incoming hopper. The fire computer had it all figured out: the target’s speed, the gravity, the velocity of the incredibly hard uranium slugs that hammered the hopper. It couldn’t miss.

  It didn’t miss.

  The hopper’s armor wasn’t enough. The machine-gun fire punched through it. Wilks could see sparks as bullets hit the plating, sparks that blossomed as air from within spewed out and fed the tiny fires.

  The tracers raked the ship, found the engine, smashed through and destroyed it. The hopper lost power, tumbled, out of control. Fell in the low gravity, a ruined and discarded toy from the hand of a bored child.

  “God,” Billie said.

  Wilks watched. No escape pods popped out. It was almost too easy. See you in hell, Spears.

  “Sir, the drone is drawing fire!”

  Spears nodded, pleased. “Set your fire control to backwalk the attacking battery.”

  “We’ll have to drop the stealth suit to use our targeting systems.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’ve got the drop on them. Punch them out.”

  The pilot and copilot hurried to obey.

  Got to be Powell behind this, Spears thought. I wouldn’t have guessed that you had the guts, you little no-dick bastard. But if you want to play with the best, you have got to be a lot sharper than a chickenshit ambush, Major. I am going to hand-feed you to the queen myself when I get down.

  The hopper went down, streaming oxy-fed flames that winked out quickly in the vac. The ship hit, bounced high, hit again, shattered, and sent pieces flying. The light gravity let most of the debris sail quite a distance. Those chunks that entered the station’s faux grav fell faster, bounced lower. The tracking cam stayed with the largest section. Wilks didn’t see any bodies but he supposed they were all cocooned into their seats. Just as well. The sight of a ruined human body tumbling across the landscape wasn’t one he particularly wanted to see anyhow.

  Adios, General.

  second target acquired, the computer flashed.

  OPTIMUM DISTANCE MINUS ONE THOUSAND METERS. COMMENCING FIRE.

  Wilks jumped. Stared at the screen. It took a second to register, a second they didn’t have to spare.

  “Fuck! Close your helmet! Move! We’ve got to get out of here, now!”

  He slapped his own faceplate shut, grabbed Billie’s hand, and jerked her up. They scrambled for the exit. He hit the emergency hatch control, both locks snapped up.

  They leapt for the opening as the first slugs began to punch holes in the crawler.

  17

  Spears watched the hard metal teeth of his machine guns chew the crawler to pieces. He felt a certain satisfaction in knowing he had outsmarted his enemy, had not fallen into the trap. Had not been outsmarted.

  The crawler shuddered under the impact, vibrating, shaking. They were close enough so the combat belly cam picked up the two troopers abandoning the landcraft, running away from the doomed vessel.

  “Cut them down,” Spears said. If he’d thought about it longer, he might not have given that order, the new troops always needed unspoiled containers and food, but once an order was given, he was not a man to belay it unless he had good reason. Canceling orders given in the midst of combat reflected badly on a commander; it made him look indecisive. Nor did it matter that these men wouldn’t be around to remember these orders much longer—Spears was not an indecisive man.

  The crawler continued its bullet-driven dance, and the two troopers kept sprinting. “Was I unclear in my speech?” Spears said, his voice cool and tight.

  “N-no, sir. But the computer is locked on the crawler. I’ll have to reset it for human targets.”

  “Do so.”

  “Sir.”

  The pilot’s hands fluttered. The machine guns whined on their hydraulic gyros, began to alter their aim.

  Too late. The fleeing pair achieved the safety of the station, disappearing from view.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Never mind. The crawler is dead, that was the primary threat. Hose down the other craft on the apron.”

  “Sir—?”

  “Destroy them. We don’t want to get shot in the back and we do want the only operating vehicles out here.”

  The pilot nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  One of the rules of combat was to do your enemy enough damage so he couldn’t recover in time to damage you. Spears had control of the airspace and he intended to keep it. And while Powell might think he had the station buttoned up, there were ways inside that he didn’t know about. A wise officer never let himself be caught without an entrance or an exit. Powell was not wise. Spears was.

  * * * * *

  Billie’s breath came hard, the suit’s tanks hadn’t been designed to supply so much oxygen so quickly. But they were inside, and safe. For now.

  Wilks was already halfway out of his climate suit, rushing toward a com mounted on the lock wall. He slapped the com.

  “This is Wilks. We’ve got a fubar here, Powell. Spears sent in a decoy hopper. He’s taken out our crawler, we’re in the South Lock. Billie, wh
at’s going on out there?”

  Billie moved to the lock, triggered the observation cam next to it. The little holoproj lit up. Dust puffed up in little spurts around the various vessels sitting on the ground. An occasional spark glittered on the craft, and as she watched, one of the hoppers canted wildly to one side, the support struts suddenly collapsed.

  Billie turned back toward Wilks. “They’re shooting up all the hoppers and crawlers,” she said.

  “You get that?” Wilks said into the com.

  Powell’s voice when it came through the speaker was nervous: “God. What are we going to do? He could peel open the station like a banana!”

  “He won’t,” Wilks said. “He doesn’t want to risk damaging the aliens. But he’ll have an attack plan figured out. We underestimated him. If he knew enough to give us a decoy to shoot at, he’ll know a way in we aren’t expecting. Get whatever troops you can trust with weapons armed, fast, get a combat opchan working and cover every lock. And get anybody who might be loyal to Spears into a secured area PDQ.”

  Powell said, “That won’t be easy, we can’t be sure—”

  “Listen, Major, we damn well can be sure that if somebody opens a door and lets Spears in we will be in very deep shit. Don’t take any chances. If there is any doubt about a trooper’s loyalty to you, put him behind a thick door.”

  “All right. I understand.”

  “I’ll meet you in Command Center in five minutes.”

  Wilks turned to Billie. “The general is knocking out our ability to fight him in the air, or escape on the surface. He’ll be occupied with that for a while. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Powell can issue the orders but he isn’t a combat soldier. He is going to need somebody he can trust telling him what to do. I fucked up once, we can’t afford to let that happen again.”

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “It could be worse. We’ve got the high ground. Spears can spend all his troops at one spot and we’ve got to cover every entrance, so we’ll be thin, but he’s got to come in through a lock and we can watch all of them. As long as it’s our troops on the doors, we should be able to keep him out. Powell will be scrambling the entrance codes and putting the station on full alert, soon as he gets the general’s men dogged down. Odds are still in our favor, though I should have had Powell set this all up before we tried to pot Spears. I thought sure we could knock him down. I guess that’s why he’s a general and I’m a sergeant. Come on.”