The fur about his ears still smoking, K’rok craned his neck to look around the shield. He fired back. Jack flinched as the shot broke on the battle armor. He did not even feel the heat. He wondered how far Boggs and the others had gotten.
Jack had no time for further thought as K’rok signaled, firing, even as the saurian charged him.
He let his reflexes go, hit the power vault, and let the beast’s own vectoral force spin him away, down the corridor. Before landing, he let off another shot at K’rok, who ducked away.
The Milot showed his teeth. “You and I once be comrades in war, eh, Jack? Now you wonder why I be with the Thraks.”
Jack hadn’t, but suddenly he knew. “Because you can’t survive if you’re dead.”
“Yes. Basic. My people’s survival be my destiny now.”
“Then step back. Let me go. I don’t want to bring you down.” Jack’s attention flicked away briefly. The saurian was still quiet on the corridor floor after having slammed into the wall. It was at his back. The last thing he wanted was to have it take him from behind.
K’rok shook his heavy head. “I have to fight, Dominion Knight. My officers ask this of me, to let me survive. You understand? And there is more. Here, on this dead moon, be a secret of the ages. For my people, I will go there and learn it.”
“Secret?” Jack watched the Milot closely. At the corner of his attention, he thought he saw the berserker twitch.
“There be something buried in the rock out there—something which my officers be very interested in. What could it be? Why here? I wonder, too. And for this wonderment, I will look.”
“You’ll have to find a deepsuit big enough,” Jack bandied as he realized the Milot was talking about the dig site. What, in God’s name, was out there?
K’rok showed his teeth even wider. “You be knowing it, too. I ask you this, fellow warrior. You wear armor from the Sand Wars. I be knowing it well—perhaps I even be knowing you, though I do not understand your youngness. The Thraks took your home and mine. Turned all to sand, to nest for their young. Why? Survival. No young, no people. In this even Thraks like you and me. Thraks are brave warriors. Death dealers. No ones, not me, not you, stopped them until they felt like stopping.”
His rear camera screen showed the saurian moving ever so slightly. Gaining consciousness, or gathering for a spring? Jack shifted balance, prepared to react. He should not be listening to K’rok, but he couldn’t help it. Here was a barbarian on the scale of galactic civilization, but one who seemed to have thought of answers to some of Jack’s questions.
“So tell me this,” K’rok said, and his voice became an intimate growl. He lowered the norcite shield slightly. “What made you and me leave our homes? Thraks. Bigger, better warriors. So what made Thraks leave nesting planets of their own?” His eyes seemed to burn through Jack’s face plate. “Bigger, better warriors. What be buried out there? Maybe one of the warriors the Thraks fear. They want to know. So do I. If Thraks fear it, then I fear it more. But to fight, it always helps to know enemy better.”
Jack had no time to answer, as the berserker growled and hit him, between the shoulders, staggering the battle armor forward. K’rok shouted, “I be leaving, Jack. Good fortune be yours,” and turned to disappear down the corridor.
Jack was too busy to watch him leave. The huge creature wrestling him scrabbled at the armor, clawing for a hold, which he was just as determined not to let the berserker get. He felt himself tilted into midair as the saurian prepared to slam him down.
*Tear him in pieces, boss.*
“Shit,” Jack answered. “What the hell do you think he’s trying to do to me?” He hit the thrusters and propelled the saurian backward, overbalancing him. The two of them crashed to the floor. Jack felt every square inch of the pressure of the hit. His teeth rattled in their sockets.
He rolled quickly and brought his boot up in the berserker’s plated face, kicking into the crimson maw of endless teeth. The gigantic lizard head snapped back with the force. It snapped and growled and came on again.
Jack knew a heart-stopping moment when he was certain he would not be able to stop it—and that Bogie was a brother of this beast. Bile filled his mouth at the thought he could be metamorphosed into an abomination like this. The rage that pumped his own adrenalin and quickened his own reflexes shrank back at the horror he felt. He heard a rending cry, inside his head.
Jack fought a gauntlet free and fired, taking off the berserker’s jaws. As blood and flesh spurted, he propelled himself from under the carcass and staggered to his feet.
He would have gone down again, almost immediately, if the Flexalinks hadn’t locked.
He shook. He was hurt. Badly. The shock wave of his fall must have scrambled something internally. Maybe broke a couple of ribs. He took a shuddering breath.
Boggs. Stash. Bailey. The rest of Crew Two, waiting for him, out there, to make a run at the laser cannons. Even if the Sweeper armory had yielded some fire power, his was the greater. They waited for a Dominion Knight to help them win their freedom.
K’rok had gone on a mission of his own, perhaps to the dig site. Jack licked his lips and forced the battle armor into a lumbering run. He wasn’t finished yet.
And inside his mind, Bogie keened in grief that he was feared and hated instead of loved.
Chapter Nineteen
Amber was sitting huddled by the hotel window when the door schussed open abruptly, and a struggling, swearing St. Colin was tossed in by a Thrakian guard. She jumped to her feet and ran to the older man as he bounced off the floor.
She spat at the Thraks, who made an irritated buzzing noise and left the doorway of the room, but the opening was still overwhelmed by the bulky figure standing there. It twisted its helmet off, and her nose was engulfed by its odor. As Colin muttered, “I’m all right,” and sat up with her help, the beast ducked down and pushed its way in.
“I be K’rok. Commander Talthos has withdrawn to our orbiting vessel. You be lucky, Walker, that I found you and not he.”
Amber, hands shaking, helped Colin up and they both sat on the couch, dwarfed by this towering, shaggy beast. She swallowed tightly. Was this the Milot from the mines? And if he was here, what was happening there? What had happened to Jack?
Colin rubbed the back of his neck.
“What’s happened?” She looked desperately from the older man to the Milot and back. If only she had not lost her weapons back on Wheeling.
“The miners have overcome the guards at the laser cannons. It’s a pitched battle out there, and the Thraks are losing. We didn’t quite make it to the sleds.”
“Where’s Lenska?”
Colin’s face pinched and he shook his head.
“Oh, no.” Amber felt her throat catch. “What do you want with us? We won’t do you any good as hostages.”
“Maybe not.” The Milot strode to the window. “The sled you be using, Walker, was destroyed with your man. But you be knowing where to go… and I want that information.”
“The coords of the site?”
Amber felt Colin stiffen at her side. She clutched his arm. “Don’t tell him, Colin. You don’t have to. Jack is either dead or taking care of himself.”
“Jack?” K’rok’s massive head made a small movement, either of surprise or respect. “You be knowing the Knight?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say anything more, Amber.”
She stared at the Milot intently. She had only one weapon left, one she could make out of herself, and she gathered her mind to do it.
He raised a glove and pointed at her. “You be a warrior, too, if small.”
Surprised, she hesitated. Colin held her hands tightly.
The Milot continued, “I have only one more destiny for my people. I must be at the dig site. Give me the information I need.”
“Why? What do you want at the site?”
His ursine eyes flickered with hot emotion. “You, Walker, want the dig. Talthos willing to risk war
with the Dominion for the dig. People of Lasertown kill themselves, for the dig. What be it that tangles all our survivals together? I must know, for my people. For the Milos that will never be again, and the Milos we hope someday to be.”
Colin’s grip on Amber relaxed as he half-said to himself, “By God, I was right. There is something uncanny about the site.” To K’rok, he added, “You won’t damage the evidence?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But you will be telling me where to go.”
“No, no, you don’t understand. It’s my religion, Milot. I can’t let you go out there to—to destroy it all.”
Amber drew in a breath and focused on the Milot. He frowned at her, beetle-browed, as though he sensed what she would do.
Colin stood up abruptly. “Take me with you. Let’s both go and see what it is.”
“Colin!”
“Stay out of this, Amber.”
“But he could… he could kill you and leave you out there, if he wanted.”
Swifter than either of them could imagine, K’rok’s hand shot past Colin, knocking him aside, grasping Amber by the throat, and dangling her off her feet. She choked and gasped, her face fiery with the effort of breathing. She lanced all her thought at him, and nothing happened.
The Milot shook her slightly. She gargled for breath and felt her body dance like a puppet. “Small warrior should know not all weapons work the same.”
“What’s he talking about? Let her go, K’rok. Let her go!”
“You be telling me what I want to know.”
Colin walked over to the hotel desk and picked up a form and a pen. Amber coiled to strike a second time.
“Ten degrees and we’ve got a direct hit!” Dobie’s voice inched higher.
“Quiet, mate, you’re disrupting my concentration.”
Jack backed up to the base of the laser cannon. His gauges were down by half, and he felt himself sucking in each breath harder and harder. By scanner, he swept the range of cold gray stone and dust in front of them, littered with broken forms, some Thrakian and a few human. “I can’t hold much longer. Point that thing and fire!”
Boggs sagged against Jack. “They won’t be calling me Pops now,” the miner said.
“No,” Jack answered briefly, his attention on his long-range tracking screen. “That they won’t. But if they don’t get that ship before it starts a strafing run, they won’t be calling any of us by name!”
As Stash made a derisive noise, Jack spotted a movement by one of the field bunkers the Thraks had thrown together. “Get down!”
Jack picked off the thrower, but not in time to catch the grenade as it hit and bounced, then exploded. More deadly than the shards of its case were the percussions, the sonic forces it expended. Jack staggered back and Boggs was torn from his side, bounding across the terrain.
He recovered and went to the old man. The hiss of the punctured suit obscured his moans. Jack found the leak, a tear in the right ankle, and with a gentle welding beam from his left finger, closed it tightly. “All right, Boggs?”
Feeble gasps answered, then, “Lost some air, boy.”
“I know. You’ll have to get back to staging as soon as you can.”
“Help me up.”
Jack gave him a hand up. Stash’s deepsuit turned and beckoned to them. Dobie had been torn off the targeting control. “Give me a hand here, mate. Dobie’s out cold.”
Perez added, “He’ll be all right, though, man.”
Boggs hobbled to the control and began to reset it. Jack rechecked the long-range screen.
“Shit. Here they come.”
Stash must be showing his teeth in that cocky grin of his, he thought, as the New Aussie answered, “All the better. Me range is a little short here.”
The laser cannon shifted direction ever so slightly. Then, Stash yelled, “Fire!” and they all ducked away from the blinding glare that their miners’ helmets could not screen very effectively.
Only Jack stood to watch the skies split by the glare as the Thrakian warship swept into view.
He whooped with astonishment, then caught his breath sharply, as the cannon scored a solid hit. The ship jumped, and veered, and sheared off, crackling with red and blue fire. Stash stood up. “By god,” he said. “I hit it.”
Jack saw a lot of movement on his tracking screen. He held up a gauntlet. “I think we’ve got our reinforcements.”
With yells and shouts of joy, breaking up into static over the com lines, the Sweepers broke out of the dome, sled after sled of them, firing sporadically at the few remaining Thraks on the field.
Ron helped Dobie to his feet. They waved their arms in greeting and as the sleds pulled up, the Sweepers leaped off and grabbed up the miners, and the unlikely pairs danced in triumph on the face of the dead moon.
Only Jack saw the Thrakian warship tip the horizon for another run.
“Move it!” he yelled, com line crackling with the force of his command. “Get this gun on a sled and get out of here! Get it into the dome or they’re going to destroy it.”
The celebration stopped. Silhouettes froze a moment, looking back over the jagged moonscape, then hustled into vigorous motion. The movable base of the laser cannon was disconnected, tools and gloves weaving in an economy of motion. To prevent its destruction, it was going back inside the domes, where it was hoped the Thraks would hesitate to destroy the fragility of life.
“Move it, move it!”
With the precision of a drill team, they hoisted the weapon onto one of the sleds. It sagged, hovers whining to hold the extra weight. Jack waved at the miners. “Run for it, dammit! The sleds will never hold all of us!”
They broke into a dead run for the domes, Sweepers and diggers alike. Jack watched them go, his ribs stabbing with every breath, and he lumbered into motion behind them. Despite the power, he could not keep up. His guts wrenched with agony and he fought to keep air in his lungs. Something wet dribbled from his chin. He tasted the flat, metallic taste of blood in his mouth.
The dome air lock yawned darkly in front of them, welcoming the first sled, and then the second with the cannon, and then the third burgeoning with personnel. He saw Boggs stagger in, and Bailey and Perez, too. All of the deepsuits made it, as the black shadows of the Thrakian warship swept over him, and reflexively, Jack dove to the surface of the moon.
It seemed to hang over him, black death, the suit mikes catching the screams of its drives.
Then, it veered away at the last second, leaving the domes of Lasertown intact.
As Jack lurched to his feet, he caught a sobbing breath as the bulkhead slammed shut. He managed a shambling run. “Let me in!”
His com answered only with static. He curled a gauntlet and pounded. No one came to open up for him.
He pointed a finger and then dropped his hand with a cruel laugh as the norcite shielding on the air lock mirrored his futile image back at him. Jack sank to the dust, locked outside, too hurt to fight any longer.
Chapter Twenty
*Jack. Get up, Jack.*
He hurt. Gods, he hurt. And he was cold, too, something he rarely had to worry about in the suit. That’s why he wore the chamois at his back, to help catch the sweat that usually trickled down his bare skin, and to keep the circuitry of the armor from chafing when he wore a field pack. The chamois lay limp across him now, for he was facedown in the dust, and cold.
*Come on, Jack. We’ve got to go.*
He twisted a little in the armor, leads crimping, and then made the suit roll with him, roll so he could get up again. His whole body protested with sharp, jabbing pains that brought a groan to his lips. He’d taken too much punishment lately. He couldn’t take any more.
*Sure, you can, boss. Come on or we’re going to be late.*
Jack recoiled from that mindtouch with the realization of what it was he was hearing. Berserker. Like that miscreant he’d killed at the mines. Spawn of a miscreant which would cannibalize him soon, metamorphosing them into a… a thing that knew only to
eat and kill or be killed.
*No, boss.*
“Don’t deny it. You can’t deny it. You saw it yourself, through me.” Jack leaned against the dome. He balled his gauntlet into a fist and pounded one last time. Looking up, he saw laser fire scoring against the sheeting and blackened junk that used to be a security camera system once upon a time. They couldn’t even see him to know he was out here. He shook his head once, slowly, to clear it.
*Let me help you, boss.*
Jack stiffened. The mindtouch encircled him intimately, a whiskery fine touch over skin and bones and muscle and blood inside. He thrust back angrily and the touch withdrew quickly as though shocked. “Leave me alone. You can have me when I’m dead, not before.” He wobbled away from the useless bulkhead. He could circle the domes. He knew there were other air locks, other entrances. Surely he could find someone or something to acknowledge his presence and let him in.
Gently, but strongly, *No, boss.*
The suit locked to a halt despite Jack’s movement inside of it. He gasped with the pain of stopping.
*We have to go.* Slowly, the suit pivoted and reeled away from the dome, in a different direction.
“No. There’s nothing out there. This place is dead, Bogie, and so am I if I don’t get inside!”
*Sorry, Boss. Got to go. I can help you if you let me—*
“No!”
*Then you’ll just have to come as far as you can.*
Without his volition or direction, the suit jerkily began to stride across the landscape. His legs moved swiftly without his telling them to, trapped within seven league boots of armor he could no longer control. He was answering the siren call that had led so many others to death whether he wanted to or not.
The entity Amber had once described as a baby, parasitic and selfish, had now come into its own. Jack could no longer dominate it. As he’d seen it happen on Milos, Jack was approaching the beginning of the end. As the suit began to take the lunar landscape in leaps and bounds, he threw back his head and screamed, but there was no one human to hear it. “Let me go!”
Lasertown Blues Page 17