by Bobby Adair
Now skimming the surface, a few hundred feet up, moving slowly, Howard is having trouble keeping the ship moving in a straight line. He’s talking to Booker in a private conversation.
Kane gets that the damage to the ship is making it hard to fly. Red and yellow streaks are coming off the moon from somewhere over the horizon. The Grays are still shooting. The sky is so full of debris, it’s impossible to tell what the aliens are shooting at.
That makes Kane anxious. Too many good men are dying.
Howard only needs to coax the ship a little closer.
“We need to move this thing along,” Garcia tells Booker, echoing Kane’s thoughts. “Get us some speed. Lose the caution.”
“Caution?” Booker shoots Garcia a harsh look and the laugh that follows is anything but happy. “You’re lucky you’re not outside pushing this thing right now. The main engines are still good, but maneuvering thrusters aren’t working worth a damn.”
“Go faster, then,” Garcia tells him, not backing down.
Booker grits his teeth, takes a second to respond calmly and says, “If we put on too much speed, we’ll overshoot and probably fly right over the damn ship at point-blank range. That won’t end well.” He closes out Garcia’s request with, “We’re doing the best we can.”
“We’re just anxious to get into the fight,” says Kane. “Know what I mean?”
Booker nods.
In a more peaceful tone, Garcia asks, “What’s the plan, then?”
Booker says, “We can’t get a fix on how far that Gray ship is over the horizon. I think we’re close. Our plan is to fly at this altitude—we’ll speed up if we can—and as soon as we spot the Grays, we’ll drop down below their line of sight. The horizon will keep them from shooting at us.”
“How far will we be?” asks Garcia.
“Not to go all scientist on you,” says Booker, “but standing flat-footed on the moon, you can see maybe a couple kilometers to the horizon. At this altitude, maybe we’ll see ‘em fifty kilometers out. It’ll give us a chance to sneak in close. Maybe two or three clicks.”
Garcia seems satisfied with the answer. “You and Howard should come with us.” His eyes scan across the ship’s control panels. “I don’t think the ship is going to get us back to earth.”
“We need to stay with the ship,” says Booker. “We need to see what’s damaged. We need to know what she’ll do. Besides, if you guys don’t pull this off, we have our orders.”
“Your orders?” Kane asks. He’s suspicious. “You’re not talking about returning to earth, are you?”
Booker shakes his head. “Just like you guys, we volunteered for this. We knew what we were getting into.”
Garcia makes the guess first. “You’re going to go kamikaze?”
“If you guys don’t capture that ship… “ says Booker, but he doesn’t finish the thought. Instead, he says, “All those railguns that destroyed our fleet, those were fired from their ship. That’s a lot of firepower from one ship, but you know what?”
“Is that rhetorical?” asks Kane.
“Yes,” answers Booker. “All those weird underground structures the Grays have been building, the ones with the little holes in the middle. Do you know how big those holes are?”
“A few feet?” guesses Kane. “A few meters?”
“Ten meters across,” says Booker, “The biggest ones are that large. Fleet command now thinks those are railguns. It came across the comm back when we were getting hammered up there.”
“Why would they need guns that big?” asks Garcia, too stunned by the revelation to make the deduction himself. “They did just shoot most of our ships down with the small caliber batteries?”
“They aren’t for shooting down our ships,” says Booker. “Command thinks they’re going to use them to bombard earth.”
“Christ,” mutters Garcia.
“Exactly,” says Booker.
Kane is running through the scenario in his head, and it’s immediately clear to him that if those big railguns can fire a projectile at anything near the speeds of the smaller variety, then earth is in trouble. The Grays will be able to rain a meteor storm down on earth’s cities, and there won’t be a thing any human can do to stop it.
Those eighteen Grays don’t need an army. They’re going to lay siege to an entire planet that won’t end until enough people die to break humanity’s resolve. And earth will surrender itself into slavery.
Damn those little gray bastards!
“Those larger caliber railguns,” says Booker, “they’ll hit with the force of a small nuclear device. The Grays will be able to take out small towns with a single slug. A few dozen hits might obliterate New York or London. We don’t know if those guns are operational, but you can bet they eventually will be. We need to stop them, no matter what.”
“No matter what,” echoes Kane.
“Got ‘em,” shouts Howard over the comm, just as he sends the transport into a dive.
Chapter 10
Booker says, “The Grays’ ship is about twenty clicks out.”
Kane is watching the moon’s surface come up fast. He says nothing, but squeezes his armrests and tenses, hoping they’re not crashing.
The pilot levels out a dozen meters above the dusty surface.
“Any idea how you’re going to get in?” asks Booker. “It might be just you guys making the assault.”
Thumbing in the direction of the platoon, Garcia says “We’re all carrying C4, enough to split that ship in two. I think we can make a hole big enough—”
“Shit!” shouts Harney.
Kane blinks instinctively as a glowing projectile arcs over the horizon and streaks past.
“How the hell did that happen?” shouts Garcia. “They can’t see us.”
Booker doesn’t answer. He’s fully engaged again. He’s pointing to the right where an ancient meteor left a depression in the moon’s surface, several miles across.
Howard veers.
The engines rumble.
He’s going to goose it.
“They’re using the moon’s gravity,” says Kane, “to curve their shots over the horizon. They saw where we were before we dropped down. They only need to guess our altitude.”
Another projectile streaks past.
Two more go by, high.
“They’re really after us,” says Booker, like he’s trying to find a joke where there isn’t one.
The ship picks up speed under the influence of a familiar rumble.
Kane sees another flurry of projectiles come over the horizon and grow in size.
Harney spews a string of curses.
The projectiles seem to be coming right at the ship.
And in the last second, right before everything goes black, it looks like one is coming right at the ship’s windshield.
Chapter 11
“Hey, you all right?”
Kane looks up to see Garcia standing over him with the black sky above. “What happened?”
“We got hit.”
Kane realizes he was unconscious. He struggles to sit up but can’t.
“You’re still strapped in.”
Kane looks down and pops the clip in the center of his chest with his fist to loose the constraining straps.
Around him, he sees the ship looking like a giant ripped it open lengthwise with a can opener. Soldiers are in their seats. Parts of them, anyway. Most look dead. Some are up and moving. Debris is scattered across the pristine gray surface in every direction. “Jesus.”
“Yeah,” says Garcia. “We took one right through the bow.”
Kane sees Booker’s seat sheared at chest height. He sees Booker’s legs sticking beneath the remains of the instrument panel. It’s an easy guess that the top part of his body went with the rest of the seat. Howard’s seat is completely gone. Harney’s is empty. “Sergeant Harney?”
Garcia shakes his head. “He’s like a cockroach. Unkillable.”
Relieved at that bit of news, Kane looks
at the metal hull, completely gone just above the top of his seat back. He realizes if he were two or three inches taller, he’d be missing half his skull now. “How many?”
“Dead or alive? What are you asking?”
“Alive?” It’s always better to sound like an optimist.
“Seven and you?”
“And me?” asks Kane, looking down at his arms and legs for wounds. “What does that mean?”
“We’ve got seven who can make the attack.” Garcia reaches behind Kane and pulls on an umbilical, and shows it to Kane.
Kane shrugs. It looks just like the one he connected to when he was seated, only it’s longer. It has to be the one from the ship’s emergency kit, there in case anyone needed to go EVA and make a repair en route to the moon.
“Your breathing apparatus took a hunk of shrapnel,” says Garcia. “You can’t unplug.”
“What?” Kane reaches around to feel the bulky backpack integrated into his suit. He finds a fist-sized hole through the left side.
“You were lucky.”
“No, I wasn’t.” Connected to a broken ship. Forever, or so it seems.
“You were.”
Looking around at the remains of the ship, Kane asks, “The life support system still functions?”
“The tanks you’re connected to weren’t punctured. With the rest of us off the system, you’ll have enough to keep you alive for three or four weeks, I’ll bet.”
Kane shakes his head. “Whatever you’re getting at. I’m not going to sit here and… ” He looks around again, not knowing what the and is, and sees that the ship has come to rest beside a hunk of stone as big as a house.
Garcia points at the outcrop. “About a click that way on the other side of this pile of rock is the alien ship.”
Kane starts doing the estimates. He can probably go five minutes unplugged before his suit’s air starts to turn toxic. If he does it right, he might cross a click in low g in three or four minutes. Then he’d have a minute or so in the fight before he started to suffocate. It’s a crap plan, but it’s better than waiting in the company of frozen corpses, staring at a black sky and waiting to die. “Did any other ships make it this far?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” says Garcia. “Get a repair. Switch suits.”
“Yeah.” It doesn’t take a genius intellect to make that leap. Kane looks around for a man in the platoon who might have sustained a head injury, someone who can donate a functioning suit. “If I can get inside an airlock or something. I just need to get out of the vacuum for five minutes.”
“I don’t know if anybody made it but us,” says Garcia. “You can tune into the fleet channel on the ship’s system.” He shakes his head. “We can listen. We can’t send.”
“What does that mean?”
“Some other ships are still in the fight, but we’re the only ones on the surface.”
“Out of two hundred?” Kane witnessed the carnage coming in, but he can’t believe it was that bad. He looks up. “How many are out there?”
“Five, six. Not sure.”
Kane looks at his feet and heaves a sigh. “Do we have a plan?”
Garcia slaps him on the shoulder. “Good. You’re not ready to give up just yet.”
Chapter 12
The umbilical that attached Kane’s suit to his chair was only four feet long. The one he’s connected to now is forty feet—long enough.
Kane is perched atop of the rock formation and tethered to the ship on the ground below.
A kilometer away, across a rocky plain pocked by circular depressions, each with the barrel of a railgun peeking out, sits the alien ship, enormous and unassailable. Its guns are still firing at the few assault ships still up there.
For that—for every soldier they’ve killed, for the wicked plans they spin to enslave the people of the earth—the Grays need to die.
Before Lieutenant Garcia, Sergeant Harney, and the other five started out for the alien craft, they helped Kane search the ship’s wreckage to find one of the platoon’s machine guns and a grenade launcher. They also came up with seven or eight hundred rounds for the machine gun and a few dozen grenades for the launcher. The platoon brought a lot more ammunition with them, but most of it blew out into space when the ship got hit.
Kane doubts his tiny weapons will damage the alien behemoth, but that’s not his purpose. He’s the diversion, and when the moment comes, he’ll be the mosquito annoying the giant so the men on foot won’t be noticed.
Garcia and the other men are nearly halfway to the ship.
There’s no cover between here and there, so they’re spread out and bouncing across the surface in a low-g skip that's worked well on the moon since the days of the Apollo missions. It doesn't look dangerous, not intimidating in any way.
But looks aren’t important. The lunar expeditionary force—what’s left of it—isn’t here to frighten.
Each of those men is hauling enough C4 to blow a huge hole in the side of that ship.
And then, if the Grays do have an armed slave army in there, each soldier is carrying over a thousand rounds plus hand grenades. They’re prepared to kill their share.
A door opens on the side of the alien ship.
Kane has seen it before. After the scientists’ lander was disabled a year ago, that door opened, and it stayed open for two weeks. As those scientists slowly breathed through the oxygen in their tanks, they came to the inevitable conclusion, the same one reached by everyone watching from earth. The scientists left their lunar lander and entered as prisoners.
This time, though, the door is not empty and inviting. Humanoid shapes in space suits smeared in modern tribal war paint are marching out in ragged order. No, not marching at all. They’re a mob.
They don't look like the frail Grays from the video. These look like men, squat and thick.
They’re the Gray’s slave army, armed to fight.
Kane aims his machine gun, ready to shred the closely packed enemy.
He notices they don’t appear to be carrying rifles, not slings, not even bows. Not ray guns or anything of the sort. Their weapons look like broadswords, halberds, and axes, no two alike.
Over the comm, Kane asks, “You see this, LT?”
“Got it,” Garcia answers.
“Tell me when to shoot.”
“All I see are mêlée weapons,” says Garcia, “Hard to believe. Let’s hope this is exactly what it looks like.”
Other men chime in on the channel, ready for some little gray fucker abuse, itching to fight, wanting it to be a slaughter.
“Here’s how we’ll play it,” says Garcia. “Ronson, Mitchell, you’re with me. We’ll start shooting, single shots, not enough to scare them. Just enough to piss ‘em off and make ‘em come at us.”
Garcia, Ronson, and Mitchell are the three on the left flank of the soldiers.
Garcia says, “Harney, you four lay low. When the aliens charge us, you take your four behind them and rush that open door. Once you get inside, blow that ship to hell.”
Kane nods to himself. He approves of the plan.
“Kane,” says Garcia, “once that big bunch of assholes gets close, you unload on ‘em.” Then he laughs darkly. “But don’t shoot any of us, okay?”
“Not a problem.”
Garcia stands tall and fires his weapon. Ronson and Mitchell do likewise.
It’s strange seeing the flash of the M4s without hearing the report. In fact, not hearing anything but the sound of the platoon’s survivors over the comm, breathing as they move, and talking in curt phrases to coordinate as they get down to the business they trained for.
Kane levels his gun, and stabilizes his position. Those alien slaves are a kilometer away. Easily in range with no air to slow the rounds, but he’ll have to aim high even with the moon’s light gravity. He doesn’t want to accidentally shoot any of the three soldiers standing between him and his targets.
“Ronson,” calls Garcia, “fall back. Run if you can. Make a
show of it.”
Ronson retreats a dozen meters, stops, fires a few rounds, and then falls back again.
The alien slaves are coming. They’re taking the bait.
Kane wants to mow them down, but he’s got to be patient and let the plan play out.
More slave soldiers pour out of the alien ship, bringing the total to maybe three hundred. They efficiently bounce across the moon’s surface, moving faster than Garcia, Ronson, and Mitchell are retreating—much faster, in fact.
“LT,” calls Kane, “the ones in front will be on you in another thirty or forty seconds.”
Garcia stops, evaluates for a moment, and says, “Ronson, Mitchell, take a knee and fire. Kane, let ‘em have it. Harney, as soon as those last ones clear out of the door, go.”
Kane fires a short burst, and the tracers fly high.
He adjusts, pulls the trigger again, and finds his mark.
Some of the alien slaves fall.
Some of the tracers veer into space.
“What the hell?” Ronson shouts over the comm.
Kane fires two more bursts. More aliens go down. More tracers veer off.
Some of the downed aliens get up.
“They’ve got some kind of field,” Garcia deduces right away.
Garcia is standing and looking through the scope on his weapon, not firing. “Kane, keep shooting!”
Kane rakes a long burst across the mob of charging slave soldiers.
“Whatever it is deflects the bullets,” says Garcia. “But the shield is only in the front. Mobbed together like that, some of the bullets ricochet into their guys from the side. Keep shooting!”
Kane lets loose.
“Spread wide,” Garcia tells the others, “Shoot ‘em from the flanks.”
Harney and his three men have covered half the distance to the open door on the side of the ship.
It doesn’t appear the mob attacking Garcia’s position knows they’re being flanked.
Kane’s M240 runs dry.
Damn, those bullets went fast.