Victis honor, he thought. Let’s hear it for the losers.
22
“What about Mitch?” Wilks scanned the wide corridor as Powell drove the loaded truck, looking for somebody who might recognize them. So far, nothing.
“I don’t know,” Wilks said. “After that last stunt with the guards in the hangar, he’ll have bailed out of the life-support control room—Spears would have sent troops to secure it. We’re lucky he stuck around as long as he did.” “You promised we wouldn’t leave him.” “Look, Billie, he’s brighter than nine tenths of the troopers on this base and that probably includes me. He’ll know we have to get off this planet. We don’t know what Spears has in mind, exactly, but once he’s lifted, whoever is left behind is history, probably pretty quick.”
“We haven’t seen any of the aliens lately,” Billie said. “Maybe they’re all dead.”
“You don’t believe that.”
Powell cleared his throat. “Spears has probably gotten them back under control using the queen,” he said.
“But Mitch—”
“Has got himself some dandy new metal legs and enough sense to know where they need to take him,” Wilks finished. “He’s probably hiding in one of the hangars already.”
Billie fell silent. She wasn’t sure how she felt but she didn’t want to leave Mitch behind, that much she knew.
“We aren’t going to just drive up to the ship, are we?” she said.
“I don’t see why not. You keep your head down, nobody’ll notice you. They’re in a hurry, nobody is going to expect to see us driving the truck. We park, hop off, get lost in the shuffle.”
“It seems unlikely.”
“You don’t know marines very well,” Wilks said.
“He’s right,” Powell put in. “Everybody will be so nervous about screwing up and getting left behind they won’t be working by the numbers.”
Billie shook her head. She didn’t think it would work but she didn’t have any better ideas.
Pretty much everything material that Spears valued could be tucked into a single hardshell case. There was the pair of matched Smith & Wesson snub-nosed stainless-steel revolvers with custom wood grips, antiques that had belonged to a former South American tinpot dictator who’d set himself up as ruler on Lebanon II in the Khadaji System. Spears had pulled the weapons from the man’s belt after he’d shot him in the head. Here were the carefully packed cigars, snug in their inert gas containers inside a padded plastic box. Next to the cigars, a reader and a small collection of read-only infoballs, military manuals and histories. A hologram of his basic training class on completion day. Probably most of them were dead by now. He had other things, of course, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced. A soldier traveled best who traveled light, after all.
His packing done, Spears left his quarters and started for the ship. He did not look back.
Despite what he’d told Billie, Wilks was nervous. The hangar was huge and there was a lot of scurrying activity, but if something was gonna go wrong, it would be in the next few minutes. Well. A man did what he had to do and fuck the rest of it. At least he was armed now, and if he went down, he would go down fighting. There were worse ways to die if you were a marine. And being eaten from the inside out by an alien baby was as bad as anything he could imagine.
Two troopers using hoop-lifts were busy loading the aliens into the ship. The name stenciled on the side was CMC MACARTHUR.
“Pull around beyond the other truck,” Wilks said. “Park it and step off on the opposite side, away from the loaders. There’s a service bay forward, amidships, right?”
“Right.”
“What do we do if somebody recognizes us?” Billie asked.
“Put them down. This ship is leaving. If we have to fight our way onto it, that’s what we do. We can slag the hatch controls and lift right through the roof panel if we have to. Major? You got a problem with that?”
Powell shook his head but did not speak.
Wilks wasn’t sure about Powell, but he didn’t have a lot of choice about his allies at the moment. Billie, yeah. Bueller, if he showed up. Powell, well, he guessed he’d see.
The truck carrying its cargo of potential death rolled forward on its fat silicone tires.
Spears saw the last truck go past as he approached the ship. Another fifteen minutes and he’d be loaded and ready to leave. The first step toward his ultimate goal, the retaking of Earth.
The lieutenant he’d left in charge came up at a quick step. “Sir, the final transporter has just arrived.”
“Load time?”
“Ten minutes, sir.”
“Good, good. Once the ship is packed, you are to assemble the men at the Grant. The course has been logged in, you’ll follow the MacArthur and the Jackson into orbit and we’ll make the shift to E-space. Any questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Carry on.”
Spears looked at the men loading the MacArthur. Nodded at one of them who glanced over at him. Strode away, toward the command ship Jackson.
* * * * *
Wilks and Billie were almost at the service hatch when somebody behind them called out.
“Hey, you three! What are you doing there? This area is off-limits!”
Wilks turned, ready to pull his carbine up and start shooting. But Powell moved into the line of fire between Wilks and the trooper behind them.
“At ease, trooper,” Powell said.
“Major Powell?”
“That’s right.”
For a moment the young marine looked confused. It had been drilled into him from his first day in the Corps: If an officer says jump, you’re in the air before you ask how high he wants it. But this was one of Spears’s troops, and the major was no longer in command. The trooper’s intellectual waters might be muddy but one thing was clear: A general outranked a major and the general was giving the orders.
“Keep moving, Billie,” Wilks said softly. Since Powell blocked the marine guard’s view, he slowly shifted his weapon, swung the barrel around carefully.
“You’d better come with me, sir,” the trooper said.
“I don’t have time for this, marine,” Powell said. “General Spears and I have settled our differences and I’ve got business that cannot wait. Call him, if you like, but hurry it up.”
From his angle, Wilks could see the trooper reaching for the bonefone control over his right ear. In another second he would be online with whoever was running the operations channel and the game would be over. Wilks now had his carbine aimed right at the trooper—only Powell stood right under the sights. Now or never.
“Powell, get down!” Wilks yelled.
The major was pretty quick. He dived to his right, hit flat on the deck, giving Wilks a clear line of fire.
The young marine was confused again. He didn’t know whether to finish his opchan call or shoot. He tried to do both.
Wilks fired a single round, hit the man square in the middle of the chest. A clean heart shot. With the 10mm high-velocity slug, such a hit would usually put a man down pretty fast. The head and spine were better targets, but while a single shot might go unnoticed in all the mechanical noise and fuel venting in the hangar, a full burst would not.
The trooper went down, still looking confused. His carbine sagged. Went off. Half a dozen rounds blasted from the uncontrolled weapon, bullets spanged off the deck. Damn!
Powell, who was rolling, caught at least one of the slugs when he came up in the wrong place. Wilks saw the man’s head explode.
When he’d been a boy, Wilks had once put a big firecracker into a watermelon. The effect of the bullet at this range was much the same as what had happened to the watermelon when the firecracker went off.
“Ah, shit!”
“Wilks?”
“Get in the ship, Billie. Fast!”
* * * * *
Seated in the control cabin of the Jackson, Spears got a call on the opchan.
“Sir, there has be
en some small-arms fire near the Mac Arthur.”
Spears reached out and put the control computer online. “Cause?”
“Sir, we found Major Powell’s body next to that of one of the sentries.”
“I see. Any other activity?”
“No, sir. The MacArthur is loaded and sealed.”
“Good. Let Powell’s traitors bury him,” Spears said. “I will be lifting off in three minutes. Clear the hangar and cut the gravity.”
“Yes, sir.”
Spears slaved the MacArthur to the Jackson, checked the codes to be sure the computer didn’t have them wrong. Everything was green, all systems functioning properly. Overhead, the hatch covering the hangar began to slide back. He could feel the drone of the big pumps as they sucked the air inside the hangar into storage tanks. The gravity began to fade. A small tap on the repellors and the ship would rise. Once he was clear of the hangar, he would light the engines and boost into a slingshot orbit.
“Launch minus one minute,” came the dry voice of the control comp.
The infocrawl on the screen sped by. The Jackson was clear to lift, the hatch over the MacArthur would be fully retracted in thirty-six seconds…
Spears nodded to himself. Perfect.
* * * * *
Inside the ship, Billie and Wilks looked at rows of aliens in their containers, stacked on their sides in bins, three high.
“Christ,” Billie said.
“Yeah. Come on, let’s find the control room.”
They’d taken half a dozen steps when the gravity faded considerably.
“Wilks? What is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a malfunction in the station. Or maybe…” he trailed off.
“Maybe what?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Wilks. Don’t start holding out on me now.”
“Could be we’re about to lift. Inside a hangar they’ll shut down the faux grav and use the repellors to boost, that’s SOP so they don’t fry the hangar with the engines” exhaust.”
“We can’t leave. Mitch—”
“I know, I know. Let’s see if we can find the control room and do something.”
With the gravity reduced to that of the planetoid, normal walking was impossible, they’d bound to the ceiling with every step. Wilks moved using a kind of swimming hop. He’d take a short, tiny step, grab something anchored, and pull himself along as if they were underwater. Billie figured it out pretty quick and it seemed to work.
They hurried toward the control room.
“Lift-off commencing,” the computer said.
Spears felt a slight tug as the repellors kicked on, shoving the ship straight up. After a moment the repellors cut off and the massive ship drifted upward like a hot-air balloon on a cool and crisp morning. Spears touched a control. The external hardskin armor retracted and the inner polarized plate in the control cabin cleared. The blackness of space lay over the ship and planet like a shroud pierced with laser points.
He liked space travel, the sense of going vast distances to do great things. Made a man feel powerful, knowing he could conquer the galaxy that way, secure in his machine from the killer vacuum that would steal your air.
Can’t touch me, he thought. He grinned at the vac for its impotency.
He switched another control on and got external cameras going. Put the rear viewer onscreen. Saw the MacArthur begin to rise from the base.
When the second ship was clear, Spears found another control, one that had not been installed when this ship had been built, a jury-rigged button atop a powerful transmitter. He had put that one in himself. He shoved the button down with his thumb.
Below, the engines of the remaining starships would begin converting themselves to molten waste. In less than a minute, what had been the acme of man’s technology would be no more than a white-hot soup of swirling metal and plastic and electroviral matrices, all cooked beyond repair by anyone less than a god. And if God could fix them, he was one hell of an engineer.
Carefully, Spears opened the plastic box containing his cigars. He picked one from the middle of the box, pulled the tube out, twisted the airtight cap free. A tiny whoosh as the inert gas escaped, bringing with it the smell of a fresh cigar. He tilted the tube, removed the dark Jamaican Lonsdale, and looked at it with reverence. Worth a fortune, the dark-leafed beauty was about to go up in smoke. He smiled. Wasn’t that the way of things? Even a great cigar would be nothing but ash after it was smoked. Things didn’t endure. Only deeds lasted. And nobody had ever done a greater deed than to reclaim an entire planet from an enemy, and the motherworld of humans to boot.
He clipped the end of the Lonsdale with his cutter, wet the fragrant leaf with his lips, sucking on it lightly, then reached for his lighter.
The first puff filled his nostrils and sinuses and he blew it gently into the control cabin’s cool air, watched the blue smoke pulled into the cleaners.
It didn’t get much better than this, thought the savior of mankind. No, sir.
23
“Wilks!” Billie yelled. “Stop the ship!”
The gravity was gone, the ship was lifting, and Wilks knew there was no help for either from where he sat. The control board for the vessel was locked; nothing he tried got any response. Still, he tried.
“Wilks, goddammit, you promised—!”
“So fucking sue me! I can’t do shit here! We’re on automatic!”
Billie stared at him as if he had suddenly sprouted horns and a forked tail.
“This ship is probably slaved to Spears’s,” he said. “We go where he’s going. I’m sorry.”
She stared, not speaking.
Wilks sighed, leaned back, and pulled his safety straps tight. Okay, it was too bad about Bueller, but it wasn’t his fault. He would have held the ship down for the android if he could have, but there was no help for it. It galled him to leave a marine from his unit behind, but he’d done it before. A lot of his comrades had died along the way. When your number was up, it was up. What the hell. Billie would probably come around to that view, and if she didn’t, too fucking bad. Life was hard. She should know that by now.
Spears had his com on and it was only a matter of a couple of minutes before the frantic calls began to come through.
“General Spears! This is Pockler, on the Grant! There’s been an engine malfunction! The ship is nonoperational, sir! We can’t lift!”
Spears looked at the com. The transmission was no-pix, so he couldn’t see the man’s face, but he could tell well enough from the tone of voice how rattled the trooper must appear.
“General Spears? We’re getting reports from the other ships, somebody has sabotaged their engines, too! Sir! Please answer!”
Spears took another puff of the cigar. God, this was a great smoke! He’d have to toke it all, of course, you couldn’t smoke half and save it for later, it wouldn’t store even in dead gas, not and be fresh like before.
“General Spears! Sir, we are trapped here! You’ll have to bring the Mac Arthur back down!”
The ventilators sucked the used smoke away. He thought about shutting the things off and blowing a few smoke rings—they’d hang there for a long time in the greatly reduced gravity—but no.
“Sir, the alien drones have all gone crazy! They’re hammering at the ship, they’re everywhere, it’s like they’ve lost their minds!”
Spears observed the glowing end of the cigar, held the thing up so the nearest intake vent could draw the ash away. Wouldn’t do to foul the cabin with the residue, no matter how valuable it had been before. So, the aliens could tell that the queen was off-planet. Interesting. He wondered if the empathic connection was shut off by distance. Must be something like that. Mama had left and the children were upset. Most interesting.
“General—!”
But a good cigar, ah, now that was really interesting.
The ship’s controls were locked but the com was operational. Wilks wasn’t gonna be making any outgoing calls; he didn
’t want to take the chance somebody might overhear them—so far, he didn’t think anybody knew they were here. And not that he had anybody to call, anyhow.
But somebody knew they were here. The board cheeped with an incoming, complete with visual.
Bueller.
Damn.
“Mitch!”
He didn’t look any the worse for wear on the holoproj. Billie couldn’t tell where he was, there was some bland officelike background behind where he sat behind a desk. His new legs weren’t visible and if she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was as whole as when they’d met. So long ago. So far away.
“Hello, Billie. I’ve got this channel in a security pipe, computer-guided, nobody can overhear us. if you want to talk. If you don’t, I understand.”
Billie looked at Wilks.
The marine shrugged. “Go ahead. Anybody figures out we’re here, fuck it. I just realized this boat is like a pay ship, we’re carrying the cargo Spears wants.” He touched a control.
“Mitch, I’m here.”
“I’m so glad to see you’re okay,” he said. “I was worried you’d been hit when the shooting started.”
“You saw it?”
“I was across the way from you, yeah.”
“Mitch, I’m sorry—”
“Not your fault,” he cut in. “Spears has your ship slaved to his; you couldn’t have stopped it without wrecking it.”
“Can you get on another ship?”
He grinned, a small and tight expression. “Probably, though it wouldn’t do much good. The troops all piled into one and the motor wouldn’t start. My guess is that Spears slagged the engines. He doesn’t want anybody following him.”
There was a muted explosion in the background.
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 16